


The Perpetual Motion Machine

by GrinAndBearIt, paperstorm



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst, Blow Jobs, Bottom Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Bottom Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, But so so so much love and romance, Canon Compliant, Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Embedded Images, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/F, First Kiss, Fluff, Grief/Mourning, Historical References, Immortal Husbands Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, M/M, Mild Gore, Minor Violence, POV Alternating, Pre-Canon, Questioning religious beliefs, Religion, Romance, Switching, the author is not sorry, truly an embarrassing amount honestly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-15 10:46:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 53,487
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29188017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GrinAndBearIt/pseuds/GrinAndBearIt, https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm
Summary: In 1099, Yusuf and Nicolò meet during the siege of Jerusalem, as they drive their swords through each other and awaken when they shouldn't. In 2020, Joe and Nicky snuggle happily on a beach in Genoa, ignored by the strangers surrounding them and the sun setting across the water. In between, they see the passing of eleven centuries. They live through wars, earthquakes, pandemics, art movements, the age of explorers, devastating loss, political revolution, new family members, and gay nightclubs. With them all along is a love that transcends time and space; that settles heavily into their souls and exists regardless of when or where they are. Years pass, one era fades into another, and no matter what happens they always, always choose each other. Perpetually.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 95
Kudos: 128
Collections: The Old Guard Big Bang





	1. Jerusalem, 1099

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is brought to you by two academics who love research as much as they love Nicky and Joe, and have put a lot of effort into the contextual accuracy of this story. I have also done my level best to verify the authenticity of all the quotes used, but of course ‘famous quotes’ on the internet do have a habit of attributing things in popular imagination to people who did not say them.
> 
> My wonderful artist has brought such passion and knowledge to this project, creating images that not only look like art from the time period but also researching historical materials and techniques so that her pieces are as historically accurate as they could be. I could not have asked for a more wonderful partner, and I'm endlessly grateful she chose my story. 
> 
> An absolute mountain of thanks to my amazing beta [Ignisentis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ignisentis/pseuds/Ignisentis) for SPAG excellence, fabulous suggestions for additional scenes that ended up being vital, and so much interim support. Thanks as well to my incredible friend Sam, who is perpetually my most vociferous cheerleader.

_“Let this first be agreed: some beings are precisely that, ‘true beings’, both divine and supernatural.”_  
 _Michael Psellos, early 11 th century (exact year unknown)_  
  
  
When Yusuf was a child, he was fascinated with the horizon. He would sit for hours at the water’s edge, on a rock or close enough to the shore for the gentle turquoise waves to lap over his feet, and stare out at the endless stretch of blue. He was captivated by the way it cascaded into the distance until finally it disappeared beyond the edge of the world.  
  
“What is on the other side?” he would ask his mother.  
  
“I do not know,” she would always answer, as she stirred in a pot or beat the sand from a rug and only paid part of her attention to him, “perhaps nothing.”  
  
It could not be nothing. Yusuf could not imagine nothing, because it was _nothing_ , so that could not be the answer. There must be _something_ over there, just beyond where his eyes could see.  
  
As he grew, his imagination grew with him, his wild mind weaving together images of stone buildings and strange animals and people he longed to meet. He loved his village, loved his family and his goat and his bed and his friends, but everyone here was just the same. They followed the same routines, prayed the same way, donned the same garments. Yusuf imagined people who looked different, smelled different, sounded different, and knew different things, things he wanted so badly to learn so that he, too, might cease to be just the same as everyone else.  
  
He took to drawing. He was more skilled than the other children because rather than sketching out a tree or a temple from his memory, he drew from his imaginings. Their laws, his mother explained, forbade him to draw people or animals so Yusuf drew castles and monsters and ships bigger than mountains. He drew fantastical things that made his mother and father exchange a worried glance, sometimes, and tell him patiently that it was important to keep his feet on the ground and his head out of the clouds.  
  
Yusuf could not fathom a more boring life. Clouds were beautiful, and if there was any way to get up to them, he would do it in a heartbeat.  
  
* * *  
  
When he was old enough he became a merchant like his father, taking his chance to discover what lies across that sea. His father travelled up and down the coast in a small vessel that would not have fared well in the open ocean during a storm, so Yusuf saved and bartered until he managed to secure a larger boat that could.  
  
For ten years he travelled the entire border of the sea. He met the people he had only imagined, learned their languages and their cultures and their foods. He saw what lies to the North, across from his village: people with paler skin than his and different patterns of worship but they were still only people. They were not as different as he had imagined they would be.  
  
* * *  
  
It is ten years later on a warm, sunny day, when the invaders come. The sort of day where nothing like it should be able to happen. The world should not allow it, but it does. Hundreds of them pour over the city walls, in through holes they have blown into the stone, flooding the streets with chaos and blood and the piercing sounds of anguished screams.  
  
He is in Jerusalem, far to the East of his home, where he has been before but this time has stayed longer than usual. He is terribly inept at keeping track of time but he thinks it has been some months that he has lodged at a small inn and traded inland instead of across the sea.  
  
Yusuf has never held a sword before. He has never had any reason to, in all thirty-three of his years. He catches one that is tossed to him by a passing soldier and fumbles it, dropping it to the dirt at his feet. If there were time to be embarrassed, he would be, but there is not, so he scoops it up and rushes after the man, headlong into the throes of battle.  
  
The Frank who charges at him has ghostly skin and translucent eyes; and they are _wild_ , his eyes, like an animal, round and brimming with fire even though they are almost devoid of color. His lips curl into a snarl as he brandishes his own sword, shorter and straighter than the one in Yusuf’s hand, and he’s better with it, too. He moves with it like it is a part of him, an extension of his arm. Yusuf defends himself as best he can, with flailing motions and tripping uselessly over his own feet, his heart beating up into his throat and terror gripping his windpipe.  
  
He manages, somehow, to swipe at the Frank’s belly with the tip of the sword in his shaking hands. The man cries out, grasping at his gut as blood spills over his fingers, and for half a second Yusuf breathes and believes he has won, until the Frank lunges toward him and the pain that tears through Yusuf’s gut is burning hot and previously unimaginable.  
  
Clouds are beautiful, and if he could get up to them somehow he would do it in a heartbeat, he thinks, as he chokes on blood in his mouth and slips away.  
  
* * *  
  
When his eyes reopen, the world spins around him. The racket of the battle still rages, chaos and banging and shouting voices. Yusuf sits up, feeling urgently along his belly for a mortal wound that had been there only moments ago but now suddenly … is not.  
  
In front of him, the Frank stares with haunted eyes and parted lips. There is blood, still, on his tunic, but he is not dead either. Yusuf had been so sure he would be. And the blood stain is not getting bigger. It remains there on his clothes, but the bleeding has ceased. He spits some words at Yusuf; quick, tumbling ones, that Yusuf cannot understand. His racing heartbeat leaves him nauseous, head spinning, confusion wrapping around him like thick fog.  
  
“What’s happening?” Yusuf demands. What sort of spell has this man put on him, to gut him like a fish and then remove the evidence of it as if it had never happened?  
  
The man shakes his head, not understanding Yusuf in his own tongue. He bellows in rage, suddenly, and scrambles for his sword. Yusuf jumps and reaches for his own but the Frank gets to him first, driving his blade directly into Yusuf’s chest, cracking ribs, tearing muscle, choking him again as blood gathers into his throat and Yusuf falls over, convulsing excruciatingly until it stops.  
  
When he wakes again, the Frank is gone.  
  
* * *  
  
The fighting has not stopped, when they flee the city together. It has lasted for days, and Yusuf has lost track of the number of times they have crossed paths again in the din of it and run each other through with their swords again and again, only to wake with blood on their clothes but no marks on their skin. He does not understand it. The man – _Nicolò_ – speaks broken Greek, not as proficiently as Yusuf but well enough to rudimentarily understand each other, and they cannot seem to die. Nicolò does not understand it either (if he is to be believed, which Yusuf has not settled on affirmatively).  
  
The city will fall, Yusuf knows it will. Its people were not prepared for an assault like this. He wants to strangle the pale invader until the life slips from him for doing this to them, but life would just come back into him the moment Yusuf removed his hands, so it’s no use.  
  
They take their swords and a small amount of food they can steal and they walk, for a long, long time. They head in the direction of the morning sun, and they walk until their feet bleed and their legs crumple underneath them, and then they stop to sleep against a rock or under a canopy of trees, and then they repeat it.  
  
Nicolò is quiet and sullen, and sometimes he looks at Yusuf like he wants to run a sword through him just one more time, just to make sure, and Yusuf feels very much the same in that regard, but they do not. They walk.  
  
* * *  
  
It is nine days and ten nights before they come across another human. Yusuf trades a few of his rings for enough money to buy them a tent, so they can avoid the cities. He thinks it would be difficult to explain, the two of them travelling together when they can only barely speak to each other and come from such different worlds. And he assumes he’d be as unsafe around Nicolò’s people as Nicolò would be around Yusuf’s, so they are better off alone.  
  
“Why ask me … come with you?” Nicolò inquires one evening, as they’re sitting by the fire he built, roasting a rabbit they had caught in the afternoon. The words still tumble from his mouth in muddled, mispronounced Greek. Yusuf has been teaching him Arabic, and Nicolò has been pointing to and identifying objects in his own language, but in two short weeks they are barely any closer to proper conversation than they were the day they first killed each other.  
  
“Because I was tired of dying, and tired of _not_ dying,” Yusuf answers, poking at the glowing embers with a stick. “And I was tired of hurting you.”  
  
Nicolò exhales loudly through his prominent nose and watches Yusuf closely with those large, haunting eyes. He’d thought them ugly, at first. Clear and cold and the color of death. Now he thinks they are more like the color of the sky in early morning, after a night of rain, or the color of the ocean when the sky is overcast.  
  
Yusuf sighs as well and tips his head back to look up at the stars. “Why are we unable to die, Nicolò?”  
  
“Not know.”  
  
“Neither do I. But it is not something that … people would think we were inhuman, that we had been possessed by some sort of …”  
  
“Demon,” Nicolò supplies, in his own language, and Yusuf nods. He knows that word. Nicolò has said it enough times.  
  
“We had to leave.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“And I did not want to be alone,” Yusuf finishes. He looks at his unlikely companion. His face is familiar, now, being the only one Yusuf has looked upon for a stretch of time. It’s not as horrible as he had once thought, now that it is rarely twisted in anger. His eyes shine in the firelight, his cheeks reddened from the warmth and the smallest hint of a smile on his lips.  
  
* * *  
  
Months pass before they speak of it again.  
  
Months of learning each other’s languages enough to converse freely in them. Months of staying in one spot for weeks and then a stretch of weeks where they move every day, exploring new cities and fighting off bandits and teaching each other their own names for the constellations in the night sky.  
  
It takes months, but Nicolò becomes more than his reluctant travelling companion. The man becomes his friend. Yusuf finds himself excited when he finds walnuts at a market because they are Nicolò’s favorite. He finds it comfortable, instead of awkward but necessary, when they sleep with their backs and legs touching on colder nights. He finds the foreign way Nicolò shapes words on his tongue pleasing to listen to, like music, rather than irritating.  
  
Nicolò is still quiet, but it is a thoughtful sort of quiet, now, instead of angry or brooding. He gets lost in his mind and Yusuf watches him and wonders what he thinks of and wishes he were permitted to know. When he speaks, Yusuf hangs on his words, as captivated by his voice as he is horrified by the life Nicolò has led, full of so much hatred and shame and fear.  
  
It is a crisp night in autumn, when Nicolò sits on the ground next to him outside their tent and, from nowhere, softly says, “I never wanted to kill anybody.”  
  
Yusuf regards him with a frown and swallows carefully. They are not strangers anymore so he moves in closer and briefly lets his hand settle on his friend’s shoulder, squeezing with his fingers before he lets the touch fall away. The woods around them are still and quiet and they seem a safe place for confessing.  
  
“Neither did I,” he says. “I was not given much choice.”  
  
Nicolò’s exhale is unsteady and when Yusuf sneaks a glance at him, his eyes shine in the bright silver light from the full moon. “I answered the call because that land belongs to God and it had been stolen. He needed us to retrieve it. If we could have done that without spilling a single drop of blood I would have been happy.”  
  
Yusuf clenches his jaw for a moment, biting back the retort that threatens to escape. He does not want to fight, to yell, to say things he will regret. He will not deny that he’s angry, still, about that day. He also will not deny that he knows so little about why it came to pass in the first place. It was just blood and noise and mayhem, and they left far before the dust had settled.  
  
“Is that what they told you?” he asks in a low voice. “That we stole from you?”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“I have never stolen anything. I did not deserve to die for what someone else might have done. And Jerusalem is sacred to my people, too. You are not entitled to just take it from people who have never done anything to you.”  
  
Nicolò shakes his head slowly. “I did not know what it would be like. I did not know there were men like you, Yusuf.”  
  
Yusuf asks incredulously, “did you think it was a land filled with monsters?”  
  
“It’s what they told us. You have to understand,” Nicolò says, a pleading edge to his voice although he still refuses to look up from his hands clasped tightly together against his leg.  
  
“Who told you?”  
  
“I don’t know. Men who know what they’re talking about.”  
  
“And what gives them that authority? Your God?”  
  
Nicolò sniffs and listlessly shrugs one shoulder. For a moment, they sit in silence. Anger curls hot and insistent in Yusuf’s gut, but not anger at Nicolò. He had let go of that months ago because he found it served no purpose. They were stuck together, for the foreseeable future, maybe for the rest of time, and it did not help to have hatred in his heart.  
  
It was a lesson learned by accidental extension from Nicolò. Yusuf’s surprised it took this much time for the man to bring all this back up, because the guilt that has been written all over his expressive face every time Yusuf has mentioned his home or his family has been impossible to ignore.  
  
Although, Yusuf realizes just this second with a pang of his own guilt, Nicolò does not know that the city he laid siege to was _not_ Yusuf’s home. He is unaware that Yusuf’s family still lives on the other side of the sea, that they are likely still alive and wondering if their son will ever return. He has never mentioned that. He wonders if he’d done so on purpose. If he had taken some small, cruel satisfaction in letting Nicolò draw incorrect conclusions about the fate of Yusuf’s mother and father and brothers.  
  
Finally, Nicolò says, “I will not ask you to accept my apology. I understand that I do not deserve that, but I still want you to know that I’m sorry.”  
  
Yusuf nods. He’s not sure either, whether he accepts it. He might have to sit with it for a while before he decides.  
  
“When I saw what we had done to your city ... it turned my stomach.” Nicolò sniffs again and wipes at his nose with the back of his hand. Yusuf longs, suddenly, to take that hand and hold it. “All this time I have wanted to believe that the men I knew who campaigned for it, that they had simply been taken in, too, by someone else. That they did not intend for it to be like this. But maybe you are right, maybe they did know. Maybe I was the only one foolish enough to believe there was something holy in it. Maybe all the rest of them were lying.”  
  
Yusuf admits, “these things are never so simple.”  
  
Nicolò looks at him, then, with tears in his bright eyes. He repeats, “I’m sorry, Yusuf. For what happened to your home. For the part I played in it. For letting men who seek power put hatred into my heart. For the others who died by my sword.”  
  
Yusuf cannot keep himself from reaching out and curling his fingers around Nicolò’s forearm. The man inhales sharply as if the touch has burned him, but when Yusuf does not let go, his eyes focus on Yusuf’s fingers and his lips press together. His own hand lifts, fingertips brushing along the back of Yusuf’s palm and then his hand covers Yusuf’s. His skin is so warm.  
  
“I do not believe,” Yusuf says slowly, “that you are to blame for the things you did not know. We can only know … what we know. And I believe that you are sorry.”  
  
Nicolò nods. Yusuf does not say that he forgives him. Not yet. That fact hangs in the air between them, unspoken, but Nicolò still squeezes his hand.  
  
* * *  
  
Yusuf knows, from the weather more than anything else, that it is close to a year before he realizes he is in love with Nicolò.  
  
It does not happen all at once.  
  
It happens in sleeping with their backs touching turning into sleeping with Nicolò’s back pressed against Yusuf’s front, and Yusuf’s arm securely around his middle, keeping him close.  
  
It happens in the first time he makes Nicolò laugh – _really_ laugh, not a small chuckle or a polite smile but a laugh that makes him toss his head back and shout with it, eyes sparkling and shoulders shaking. The man is so careful with his emotions, as if he believes every uncontrolled burst of them is a sign of personal failure, and Yusuf delights in those rare moments becoming more common.  
  
It happens in watching Nicolò kindly share some bread with a small, tragically thin girl in Gaza, because she is starving, and he is too but he will not die from it like she could.  
  
It happens in the first time Nicolò dies in front of him in a long while, in a stupid accident, getting his foot stuck between two rocks in a riverbed where they bathe and drowning before Yusuf can get to him. He drags Nicolò’s bare, lifeless body back to the shore, touching his wet skin with trembling hands and shouting at him, _come back to me, breathe damn you, do not dare leave me alone_ , and slumping back in relief that crashes over him like a wave when Nicolò gasps himself back to life, coughing river water from his lungs.  
  
It happens in long days baking in the sun as they walk, it happens in starlit nights as Nicolò listens to Yusuf’s stories with an enchanted expression on his handsome face.  
  
It happens in Yusuf deciding he no longer cares about their laws as his mother explained them, because Nicolò has a face that must be drawn. After he happens upon some pressed linen at a market, he instructs Nicolò to pose for him and, for the first time, he sketches a human face, capturing as best he can Nicolò’s strong nose and magical eyes and soft mouth.  
  
It happens in realizing he has come to expect Nicolò to be there against him when he wakes in the morning and the distress that fills him once when Nicolò is not; even when it turns out he had laid there next to Yusuf until his bladder would no longer allow it and was there looking back at Yusuf with concern and confusion when Yusuf had burst from the tent in search of him, ready to tear the world to pieces if he had been harmed or lost or taken away.  
  
It happens slowly and quietly, and by the time Yusuf notices, he thinks he must have been in love for a long, long time.  
  
* * *  
  
They are staying, for once, in a comfortable room above a tavern in Rome, when Yusuf realizes Nicolò returns his feelings.  
  
He emerges from the private bath, skin still damp and warm from the water, dressed but not all the way; his chest is bare and he catches Nicolò looking. He looks away as soon as he notices Yusuf watching him, his cheeks turning furiously red and fumbling to pretend he was cleaning his sword all along instead of taking in Yusuf’s half-naked form, but Yusuf saw it. He knows what it looks like, because he is sure he looks much the same way, when they have found a pleasant spot to bathe and he is given the opportunity to gaze upon Nicolò’s creamy skin and impossibly broad shoulders and the gentle slope of his stomach and wish that he were allowed to touch it.  
  
Yusuf does not mention it. He’s not sure how he would, even though it has flowers blooming in his heart to imagine Nicolò thinking of him in that way. It makes him want to touch even more, makes him want to press Nicolò over on their bedrolls and press their lips together, whisper gently to him all the beautiful things he has always deserved to hear about himself, slide his hands down into secret places where no one but a man’s wife is meant to touch.  
  
He wants it all. He hasn’t the slightest idea how to ask for it, and Nicolò was a priest in his former life, not all that long ago, and Yusuf yearns for so many things that are all so hopelessly complicated. He finishes dressing in silence and climbs into the bed, and he drifts off into an uneasy sleep before Nicolò joins him.  
  
* * *  
  
It is another three months before it resurfaces. They are back in their tent, somewhere in the South of the peninsula. When Yusuf passes his friend a cube of cheese, their fingers brush and Nicolò startles so much that he drops it and it lands in his lap.  
  
In another time and place, if they were different men, they could pretend there’s no meaning in it. That it was nothing more than an accident. Nicolò could laugh at himself, call himself clumsy, and scoop it back up off the fabric of his tunic. But they are not different men, and so the tension crackles like lightning between them instead. When their eyes meet, Yusuf feels it. As if there is an invisible length of twine between them, one that shortens as they blink at each other, pulling them involuntarily closer together.  
  
Yusuf cannot be sure, when he thinks back on it later, whether either of them really leaned in closer. He might have just thought of it, imagined it, hoped for it, while they sat motionless with widened eyes and parted lips. He does know Nicolò breaks the string first, swearing softly under his breath and standing up, walking a few steps away as he pushes his hair back off his face.  
  
“Nico,” Yusuf murmurs, calling after him with the nickname he chose for his friend, his companion, the man he loves in that hauntingly forbidden way – like the desire to touch a red-hot coal just to see what it would feel like, even though it is obvious.  
  
“Yusuf, I …” Nicolò croaks, his voice high and weak, laced with emotion. Yusuf wishes he would turn around so he could see his face. At the same time he wishes the opposite, because any sadness on that beautiful face might have him bursting into tears.  
  
“I would never …” Yusuf begins, but he lets the rest of the sentence die in his lungs, because he’s not sure what he wants to say, or what he should be saying, or what would make Nicolò smile again.  
  
He stands, stepping forward, tentatively holding out a hand but dropping it well before he reaches his friend. He will not touch without permission, not now. Not when Nicolò is upset. Not when Yusuf knows that there are things Nicolò does not talk about. Things he maybe is not able to talk about, now or maybe ever.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Yusuf whispers, unsure of exactly what he is apologizing for but feeling as if he should, nonetheless.  
  
Nicolò turns abruptly and there are tears running down his cheeks. Yusuf feels something inside himself shatter like a clay bowl being tossed carelessly from a second-storey window.  
  
“Are we lying to each other?” Nicolò asks, shaking his head helplessly as his eyes brim over with more tears. “Pretending? How long can that last?”  
  
“Nico, I do not … I’m not asking for …” Again the words fade away, disintegrate like dry sand on a summer breeze. He has never been the type to become tongue-tied. Nicolò has called into question everything Yusuf thought he knew about himself.  
  
“I do not know, what it is like where you come from,” Nicolò says, with a sniff and with words ground out from between clenched molars, “but where I come from, it’s … I cannot. It would not be allowed.”  
  
“Who says?” Yusuf challenges, as a deep ache settles in the center of his chest.  
  
Nicolò does not answer. He does not need to; Yusuf had not asked because he truly did not know the answer, he knows it without it being said out loud. He asked because he wanted to hear Nicolò say it.  
  
He’s unable to resist. He steps forward, and when Nicolò does not flinch away he tenderly strokes the tears off his flushed cheeks, only for them to be replaced with fresh ones. It pains him so deeply to see his companion so upset, suffering pouring off him in waves. Hair falls across Nicolò’s forehead as he lowers his gaze, ashamed of his emotion. Yusuf brushes that back as well, the strands silky under his fingers and so unlike his own. He’s never touched Nicolò’s hair, he realizes, until this moment.  
  
“I do not know your God, Nicolò, but I cannot imagine he would want you to be unloved.”  
  
“What does your God say?”  
  
“I am not sure I care, anymore.”  
  
“No?”  
  
“There is nothing in our sacred texts about men whose limbs grow back after they have been sawed off, who can come back from being drowned or sliced open or crushed,” Yusuf tells him, voicing aloud thoughts he has been grappling with for months. He stopped praying months ago, as well. He wonders if Nicolò noticed. “So perhaps I think … if my religion cannot even conceive of us, it hardly gets to dictate what we are allowed to feel for each other.”  
  
“Do you love me?”  
  
“Yes,” Yusuf whispers, and feels unburdened in the admission. He’s carried it for so many days. “I will try to stop, if you wish me to.”  
  
Nicolò shakes his head, and Yusuf moves to pull away from him with a painful throb in his heart, but then Nicolò clutches at his tunic. “No, I am not saying _no_ , I mean I … do not wish you to stop.”  
  
Yusuf breathes through his nose and moves back in closer. Nicolò’s hands do not relax in his garment, as if he thinks Yusuf might disappear if he lets go. “Then why are you so miserable?” he asks, cupping Nicolò’s face in his palm.  
  
Nicolò leans into his touch and closes his eyes. “I am afraid.”  
  
“Of me? After all this time?”  
  
“Not of you. Of what it would mean, if I gave in. I have not … Yusuf, I have never – ”  
  
“I know,” Yusuf says quickly. He steps in an inch further, feeling the heat from Nicolò all the way down his body. “Sweet man, of course I know you haven’t.”  
  
“We were not supposed to, men like me, who gave their lives to the service of God. It is not … it’s _sinful_.” He spits the word, like he hates it. As if it had been pressed into him like a brand, as if perhaps he had been a shy, sensitive child and Christian hellfire had been folded into his heart instead of love and understanding.  
  
It makes Yusuf’s stomach churn in fury, to imagine it.  
  
He is not immune to it. He, too, was raised with knowledge of how things _should be_ and of course this is not it, but he cannot imagine caring about all that, anymore. Not now. Not when they were so clearly destined to find each other, not when they might be the only two like them in the entire world and might spend the rest of eternity just the two of them. What could the laws of mortal men possibly matter when they are no longer among them?  
  
He slides his hands down from Nicolò’s cheeks and around his shoulders, drawing him into an embrace. Nicolò positively shudders against him, his own arms wrapping tight around Yusuf’s back. He clings like he has never been held before, never been touched in a way that was gentle and loving instead of punitive. Yusuf realizes, with another twist of anger in his gut, that it’s possible he has not.  
  
“I am not asking for anything from you,” he assures softly. “I only want you, however much or little you are willing to allow me.”  
  
“What if I wanted everything?” Nicolò asks, his voice breathless, “but the thought of having it frightens me so much I cannot think properly?”  
  
Yusuf swallows over a swell of emotions and closes his eyes. He turns his nose into Nicolò’s hair and inhales him. “I do not know your God,” he says again, “and I do not think I know mine very well, either. But I know we were brought together for a reason. I know I belong at your side. And I know that … this, too, can be sacred.”  
  
Nicolò shivers again and his nose finds Yusuf’s neck and tucks into it. It feels, suddenly, less of a comforting fraternal embrace and instead far more intimate. He can feel Nicolò, Yusuf realizes, against his hip. Just barely, only the beginnings of arousal, but it is there. He prays Nicolò is not internally punishing himself for it, because it thrills Yusuf down to his bones, to think of this man desiring him.  
  
“The love between a man and his wife is sacred, is it not?” he asks.  
  
Nicolò nods. He licks his lips, and the movement has the tip of his tongue brushing just briefly at the skin beneath Yusuf’s beard. “It is,” he agrees.  
  
Yusuf moves one hand, sliding it down Nicolò’s back to rest at the base of his spine. He presses forward, wordlessly telling Nicolò it is alright to be closer, if he wishes to be, and Nicolò gasps as their hips tilt into each other.  
  
He realizes, with a dizziness in his head, that they have yet to even kiss properly. Yusuf drags his lips along Nicolò’s temple, needing to be sure before they do. “If you …”  
  
He pauses, unable to speak for a moment because Nicolò’s fingers have reached up to tangle in his hair.  
  
“Yusuf,” Nicolò whispers, his breath warm on Yusuf’s neck.  
  
“If you were to allow yourself this,” Yusuf continues, a rasp in his voice and a needy throb in his groin, “allow yourself to be touched and held, allow me to worship you. Do you not think that could be divine, too?”  
  
Fingers squeeze in the hair at the nape of his neck. “Why would you want that?” Nicolò argues, sad again. “I am not … anything.”  
  
“No,” Yusuf agrees, “you are not anything. You are everything. Beautiful. Kind. Passionate. A bit annoying, at times,” he adds, as a joke, and Nicolò does laugh.  
  
It is a nervous laugh. It is not the loud, free, sparkling kind Yusuf is used to, but it is a laugh, nonetheless.  
  
He finally leans back, just far enough to see Nicolò’s eyes. The tears on his cheeks have dried, and his eyes shine in the firelight, but no new ones appear. Yusuf holds his jaw again, thumb brushing along a sharp cheekbone.  
  
“I am in love with you,” he says plainly. “I have been for months. Perhaps even longer than that, perhaps I loved you before we ever set eyes on each other. It’s alright if you do not return it. I am happy enough to be your friend. But that is what’s in my heart.”  
  
Nicolò’s eyes drop to his lips and then move back up. His forehead still twists in a frown – frightened and unsure – but when he speaks his voice is level. “I am in love with you, too.”  
  
Yusuf sighs, relief descending along his spine like warm water. “May I kiss you?” he asks, and rather than answer, Nicolò tips forward and presses his lips against Yusuf’s eagerly. It warms Yusuf more than the fire, feels brighter than the sun, softer than gentle rain, more magical than starlight.  
  
Nicolò whimpers quietly into their kiss and his lips part, making it deeper on pure instinct, if he is being truthful about a lack of practice. It sends additional shivers down Yusuf’s spine and he tentatively puts his tongue out to taste, to lick at the inside of Nicolò’s upper lip. Nicolò shakes against him and is beautifully breathless when their lips fall apart, blinking with heavy lips up at Yusuf, eyes shining and the seafoam green nearly eclipsed by black.  
  
“Come,” Yusuf whispers, taking Nicolò’s hand and leading him back toward the fire. He sits and pulls Nicolò down with him.  
  
Nicolò lifts his hand, letting it float between them for a moment, and then his fingers twitch and he drops it and looks away. Yusuf reaches for it, twines their fingers together and lifts it, pressing Nicolò’s knuckles into the center of his own chest. Nicolò’s lips press in together but his fingers brush, hesitant as they are, along the fabric of Yusuf’s tunic.  
  
“Would you like to see?” Yusuf asks, wondering. “For me to remove it?”  
  
“It is not something I haven’t seen,” Nicolò replies. They have bathed near one another so many times.  
  
“No, that is true. But perhaps it is different, like this.”  
  
Nicolò’s will not meet his eyes but he nods. Yusuf reaches behind himself to pull his tunic over his head. When his chest is bare, Nicolò hesitates again but Yusuf can see the desire so plainly in his eyes and he basks in the way that feels as he encourages Nicolò to touch again.  
  
“It’s alright,” he promises. Nicolò nods and explores, fingertips sliding lightly along Yusuf’s chest, through the hair that covers it, over a nipple, to his stomach that rises and falls rapidly as he breathes. It is such a simple touch, innocent and tentative, but it thrills him.  
  
“I … do you want …?” Nicolò inquires, looking hesitantly into Yusuf’s eyes.  
  
“If you do,” Yusuf tells him. “Only if you do.”  
  
Nicolò quickly sheds his own tunic, revealing his pale skin, his wide shoulders, his tantalizing waist. Yusuf wants to devour him, but he only looks, because he has not been given permission for anything else.  
  
“You are a feast, Nicolò,” Yusuf says, smiling to himself when his companion drops his gaze and laughs, embarrassed.  
  
“Let me guess, and you are a starving man?”  
  
“Absolutely famished,” Yusuf jokes, wanting that lovely laugh again and delighting when he gets it. It is a heavenly melody in his ears.  
  
When it fades away, Nicolò shifts as if he is uncomfortable and Yusuf, eyes innocently drawn to the movement, looks away again the moment he notices the bulge below Nicolò’s waist. He has not been told he’s allowed to look upon that, and he feels guilty for it, even if it was an accident.  
  
“I feel …” Nicolò whispers, sounding unhappy about it, or perhaps simply confused, “I am not sure.”  
  
Yusuf moves in closer so that he can take Nicolò’s flushed cheek in his hand and guide his gaze back to meet it. _Damn his church_ , Yusuf thinks angrily, for doing this to this man. For teaching him that something so ordinary is something to be so ashamed of.  
  
“I know,” he says softly, while Nicolò’s eyes plead with him to make it alright. “I feel, too. I long for so many things, when I look at you.”  
  
Nicolò exhales slowly and nods.  
  
“But not tonight,” Yusuf adds. “We have time. We have so much time.”  
  
“Not tonight,” Nicolò agrees, visibly relieved, and Yusuf’s heart simply aches for him. For all the darkness that was bred into him, for all the ways this man’s heart has been broken. He vows to himself that he will stitch up every tear in him, even if it takes a lifetime. It seems they might have been given multiple lifetimes together, so he will work as long as he must.  
  
He lays down on his side, asking with his eyes for Nicolò to join him and the man does, facing Yusuf but not quite touching. They can feel each other’s heat without touch, and Yusuf finds that just as nice.  
  
“What is it you want?” Nicolò asks.  
  
“You,” Yusuf answers. He is not sure what Nicolò knows, of life, of love, of sex, and this is not the moment to teach him. “Just you. Here with me, for as long as you are willing. This condition that we have, be it a gift or a curse, I do not know how long it will last. Maybe it is forever. Maybe it’s longer than either of us can fathom. But I want to spend that time with you.”  
  
“And … the rest?” Nicolò does not elaborate, but Yusuf knows to what he refers, from the nervous waver in his voice.  
  
“I want that, as well. I want to know you, all of you. I dream of it, I imagine it every time you smile at me. But I will not demand it. It is yours to give, if you want to. Not mine to take.”  
  
Nicolò nods again and then his brow furrows once more and his eyes close.  
  
“Nico,” Yusuf breathes.  
  
The man shakes his head, curling further in on himself, face turned to the ground and away from Yusuf. Things are always so heavy in his mind. It has not escaped Yusuf’s notice. Storm clouds seem ever present, coloring every thought turning in Nicolò’s head. Yusuf moves in minutely closer, still not touching but close enough that he could, if Nicolò asked. He knows it’s what Nicolò wants, even if he’s warring against it inside himself for the moment. He needs Nicolò to ask.  
  
“Anything you would like,” he says softly. “Say it and it’s yours.”  
  
“Why are you so good to me?” Nicolò asks with a sniff.  
  
“Because you are worthy of it. You are worthy of someone being gentle with you. I will work as long as it takes to make you believe it.”  
  
It’s another moment, before he is brave enough, and when he does his voice quivers. “Could you … when you hold me, I feel … safe.”  
  
“I will keep you safe, as I know you will do for me,” Yusuf promises. “Turn over.”  
  
Nicolò obeys, rolling to his other side. Yusuf inches in the remaining distance between them, sliding his arms and one leg around Nicolò’s body. Nicolò shudders, as he has often this evening, but leans back into Yusuf, pressing the lines of their bodies together. Yusuf is slightly taller and Nicolò slightly stockier, but they align perfectly. They were made, it seems, to fit together this way.  
  
“This is how it feels?” Nicolò wonders in a soft murmur. “To be loved?”  
  
Yusuf presses a kiss to the nape of Nicolò’s neck and nuzzles into his hairline. “Yes,” he whispers back. “Do you like it?”  
  
“I am not sure I can live without it, now. Now that I know. Please do not make me. I am sorry if that’s selfish.”  
  
“It is not selfish if I feel the same way.” Yusuf presses his palm flat to the center of Nicolò’s chest, feeling the heartbeat under the bare skin. Nicolò’s hand curls around his wrist, holding on. “I promise you will never be alone. I would not go somewhere that I could not bring you with me.”  
  
“No, nor would I. I would not want to.” Nicolò is still for a moment and then his head turns, and his lips find Yusuf’s in another kiss.  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Siege of Jerusalem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Jerusalem_\(1099\))


	2. Aleppo, 1138

_“Time is something the soul constructs in movement.”_  
 _Ibn Rushd (Averroes), early 12 th century (exact year unknown)_  
  
  
Nicolò’s eyes open slowly, as if they are held closed a moment or two after he wakes with invisible weights. He blinks and stretches, the morning light bright through the canvas of their tent and Yusuf’s familiar warmth at his side. Nicolò turns his head, takes in the welcoming sight of Yusuf’s broad back and long curls, messy around his head. He is turned away, but close enough that Nicolò can still feel him.  
  
Nicolò can always feel him, even when he is far away. There is an unknowable force between them, that makes his hands quiver and his mind cloudy when they are not beside each for too long. Nicolò never believed in such tales of love and romance. He believed the strongest force in this world was God’s love and wrath. He is not so sure about that, now. What he feels when he worships Yusuf, the peace that washes over him, the sense of importance in their clasped hands, is far stronger than anything he felt in the halls of a cathedral. Yusuf’s touch seems to burn him, as all holy things should, but it is a wound Nicolò welcomes.  
  
He rolls onto his side and fits himself against Yusuf’s back, sliding an arm around his middle and burying his nose in Yusuf’s hair, inhaling him deeply and letting his eyes slip closed again. Yusuf is quiet but his hand finds Nicolò’s, fingers weaving together, as tight and solid as fibers woven together in a basket. Nicolò is grounded, more of those invisible weights laying gently over him, melting him into the embrace.  
  
“Good morning,” Yusuf’s voice whispers, scratchy and soft, after a moment.  
  
“Did you sleep well?” Nicolò asks.  
  
Yusuf does not immediately answer. Nicolò frowns, but patiently waits. Yusuf releases his hand and for just a heartbeat or two Nicolò is lost, floundering, but then Yusuf turns over to face him and lifts his other hand up to brush the backs of his knuckles along Nicolò’s cheek. He turns into it, seeking the touch and more of it if Yusuf is willing to give it to him – always, always. It is always enough to sustain him and at the same time not nearly enough.  
  
“I dreamt of them again,” Yusuf whispers. His eyes are dark as always but perhaps a little hollower, just now, than they would be if they were twinkling in sunlight as he laughed.  
  
Nicolò nods and breathes slowly. He slides his hand over the side of Yusuf’s neck, squeezing gently and then wrapping around his back. In an instant, Yusuf is in his arms. A big, strong, capable body turned small and needy, and Nicolò wraps around him like the stream around a protruding rock.  
  
“Tell me,” he requests softly. He pets Yusuf’s soft curls, winding one around the tip of his finger.  
  
“It was not a bad dream,” Yusuf says. “They were laughing, in some sunlit field. Alone, just the two of them, but they did not feel alone. Like us.”  
  
“I am glad they were happy, whoever they are.”  
  
“I only wish I knew. It has been so long. It cannot be meaningless.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
It is a discussion they have had countless times. Hundreds at least, maybe thousands. The two women, both with dark hair that flows down their backs. One with round, pale eyes like Nicolò and the other’s dark and elongated.  
  
It is not every night that the women enter their dreams, but often enough. Yusuf has kept track, in a small book he keeps in a pocket, of any new details. They are warriors, the women. Fierce and fearless. And they are lovers, like the two of them. That is about the extent of their knowledge. Nicolò does not believe, after all this time, it is mere coincidence that they both dream of the same thing, and that the women do not seem to have aged a day in the decades they have haunted their dreams. They must be immortal like he and Yusuf, he figures, because it is the only thing that makes any sense. If they were not, they would be old by now.  
  
Why they are dreaming of others like them, he could not say, and Yusuf has no answers either.  
  
Yusuf kisses Nicolò’s neck. His lips are soft and damp and they move over Nicolò’s skin as his hand explores, down the center of his chest, over the jut of his hip, to settle between his legs. Long fingers curl familiarly around him, squeezing gently.  
  
“Good morning,” Yusuf says again, and Nicolò knows he’s not speaking to his head or heart anymore.  
  
“Keep that up and it will answer you,” Nicolò jokes, heat gathering in his belly as Yusuf fondles him through his leggings.  
  
The very first time they had been together like this, Yusuf had sensed Nicolò’s uncertainty, his nerves, and he had slithered down to rest at Nicolò’s hip and introduce himself to Nicolò’s body.  
  
_Hello, there, my little love,_ Yusuf had said, mirth sparkling in his voice while his fingers brushed along the growing hardness between Nicolò’s legs and Nicolò had gasped, _it is very nice to formally meet you_.  
  
Nicolò had burst into laughter, overcome by the absurdity of it all, and like magic the spell of tension had been broken. He had tugged Yusuf back up to kiss him, unable to keep the smile from his face. Yusuf had glowed, like he always did and always does, whenever he makes Nicolò laugh.  
  
Yusuf has found it his own cleverest joke ever since, and never misses an opportunity to make Nicolò chuckle and roll his eyes by speaking fondly to his body parts.  
  
Suddenly, the silence and peace of their morning breaks as the ground beneath them begins to rumble. Nicolò looks up in surprise. His brow furrows, eyes locking with Yusuf’s, unsure of what he felt. And then the world around them lurches violently, loud and horrible.  
  
Yusuf’s brown eyes are instantly wide and panicked.  
  
“Terraemotus,” Nicolò whispers in horror. _Earthquake_.  
  
“Up!” Yusuf cries, scrambling to his feet and pulling Nicolò roughly with him.  
  
They rush from their tent, pitched closely surrounded in a thatch of trees that sway dangerously in the force of the quake. They run together, hand in hand, narrowly avoiding tripping into a massive crack in the earth and to a clearing, far enough away from trees that could fall and crush them or rocks that could slide down from hills and trap them underneath.  
  
It lasts for only moments but feels eternal. Yusuf sinks to the ground and Nicolò climbs into his lap, arms around each other, holding tight and waiting with racing hearts for it to pass. Everything shakes, jostling them roughly. The noise is thunderous. He lifts his head from the safe cradle of Yusuf’s shoulder when it does slow and the motion beneath them ceases, but Yusuf grips him tighter and hisses, “ _wait_ ,” and he is right, another flurry of motion erupts underneath after only moments, rippling along the ground, undulating it and upending them. Yusuf ends up on top of Nicolò and stays there, like he’s shielding him from the sky that could begin to crumble and fall over them at any minute.

  
  
Nicolò can barely breathe when it ends the second time. He runs frantic hands over Yusuf’s back and arms, checking him, but he’s unharmed. They both are. Only shaken, in more ways than one. Yusuf’s eyes are still wide and fearful as he looks down into Nicolò’s, his shoulders heaving as he struggles to catch his breath.  
  
“You’re alright?” he asks urgently and Nicolò nods. Yusuf kisses him, then, but it tastes like terror instead of love. He stands up, awkwardly pushing himself off Nicolò, eyes meeting once again and Nicolò is sure the fear written on Yusuf’s face is reflected in his own.  
  
“Have you ever …?” he asks.  
  
Yusuf shakes his head. “There was one in Egypt, when I was very small. I have heard tell that we could feel it, but I do not remember.”  
  
Nicolò realizes how violently his hands are shaking as he brings them up to rub over his face, and when Yusuf notices, he takes them in his own and brings them to his lips, sliding kisses over Nicolò’s knuckles. Nicolò shuffles in close and pulls Yusuf into another kiss, gentler than the last and a little more desperate, relieved, grateful.  
  
They stand and return to their tent. A tree with a trunk half as tall as Nicolò has fallen just in front of it, missing their tent and meager possessions by only the width of a foot. Yusuf swears under his breath as he looks at it, running a hand over the cracked bark as if to thank it for not crushing the few things they own.  
  
“Aleppo is only a few days’ walk to the South,” Nicolò says, voicing aloud what he knows Yusuf is thinking because after all this time they can read each other. “It is so heavily populated. There will be many casualties.”  
  
Yusuf nods and exhales before he tugs Nicolò back into his arms. Nicolò tucks his head under Yusuf’s chin, protected for the moment in his arms.  
  
* * *  
  
They hurry, and barely sleep, and they are at the outskirts of the city in less than two days. If possible, it is worse than Nicolò spent those days imagining. The city is in ruins. Homes and buildings and towers are crumbled absolutely to powder as if they were castles made of damp sand. Dust is still hanging in the air. Battered citizens in tattered clothes are combing through the rubble in likely increasingly futile efforts to locate survivors. Blood stains the ground.  
  
Yusuf curses in despair as they wander the streets, stepping over bodies and the remnants of lives that have been reduced to ash and cracked stone. The sight of a small broken toy on the ground grips unexpectedly around Nicolò’s heart and he gasps, bringing his hand up to cover his mouth. It is a smiling figurine carved from wood; its arms separated from its body, lying haphazardly in the dirt.  
  
Yusuf closes his eyes for a moment and reaches out to squeeze Nicolò’s shoulder. They are surrounded by too much chaos for anyone to pay them any mind so Yusuf chances it and puts his arm all the way around Nicolò’s shoulders. Nicolò turns into him, taking just a moment of comfort before they carry on.  
  
A small, distant cry has the hairs at the back of Nicolò’s neck standing on end and he looks up quickly, sharp-eyed as he surveys the scene in front of him. He searches like a bird of prey for the location of the noise.  
  
“Did you hear that?” he asks.  
  
Yusuf nods and he bursts into action, dashing to the nearest pile of rubble and calling into it. Nicolò takes one on the other side of the road, shouting frantically, _hello, hello, where are you?_ and in minutes he seems to be just overtop of the small voice.  
  
“Yusuf!” he yells, not waiting to be joined before he starts grabbing at slabs of stone, pulling one off of the other and tossing them to the side.  
  
Yusuf skids in the sand as he materializes by Nicolò’s side and tears at the bricks just as frantically, until their hands are bleeding and Nicolò only notices tears of desperation are sliding down his cheeks when they land on the dust below him.  
  
“Hold on,” he begs, to himself more than to the small voice still calling to them from under the wreckage, “please hold on, we are almost there.”  
  
Finally, Yusuf heaves up a particularly heavy slab and they can see her – so small, filthy, tears in her big, dark eyes and tiny hands reaching for them as she whimpers.  
  
“There you are,” Yusuf breaths in relief, dropping down to his stomach so he can lower his arms into the hole and grab her under the armpits. He lifts her up and out, her already-ripped dress tearing further on a jagged edge as he does. The sound frightens her and by the time he has her in his arms, she’s sobbing into his neck.  
  
Nicolò heaves a breath, sinking back on his haunches, wiping his hand over his mouth and then remembering it’s bleeding and reaching for the edge of his tunic to wipe the blood from his lips. He looks at Yusuf, cradling the trembling body in his arms with tears in his own eyes.  
  
“Shh,” he soothes, rubbing her back. “You are safe, I have you. Are you hurt?”  
  
The girl is crying too hard to answer, so Yusuf gently runs his fingers over her, checking for injuries and finding only small scrapes and bruises. It is a small miracle, or it should be, but Nicolò cannot dispel the idea of her trapped down there, alone and scared, for two whole days. Calling out for help that would not come, hungry, terrified.  
  
Yusuf rocks her and sings softly to her, a song Nicolò has heard him humming before as he cooked or washed or mended a sandal. She must recognize the melody as well, because in a few short minutes she’s hiccupping instead of sobbing, and a minute after that a small smile graces her dirty face.  
  
“What a beautiful smile you have,” Yusuf tells her, digging a fingertip playfully into the dimple on her cheek. He is the kindest man Nicolò has ever known and for one brief moment, he feels the warmth of that thought in the disorder of their dismal surroundings. “What is your name, little one?”  
  
“Esmar,” she answers.  
  
“It’s very nice to meet you, although I wish we could have met in kinder circumstances. My name is Yusuf, and that man over there with the funny eyes is my friend Nicolò.”  
  
Esmar looks at him, blinking curiously and tilting her head to one side. Nicolò smiles at her and waves, and she waves back in return.  
  
It takes them an hour to find her family. They wander through the streets with her perched comfortably on Yusuf’s hip, asking her what she remembers, if she recognizes anything, what her mother’s name is. Nicolò takes every step with increasing dread, wondering what on Earth they are going to do with her if her mother has been killed. He’s on the precipice of suggesting they find somewhere safe to leave her while they continue to search and help to dig others out – there must be thousands still trapped – when a shrill voice shrieks her name and before they know what is happening, a woman is before them, weeping terribly and grabbing for the girl.  
  
“Immah!” Esmar screams, nearly lurching from Yusuf’s arms and caught easily by her distraught mother.  
  
They embrace, tears flowing and wretched sobs puncturing the air around them, and then the mother grabs just as roughly for Yusuf, dragging him into their hold.  
  
“Oh, thank you, thank you,” she cries, and Yusuf promises that it was no trouble, and that he’s happy to have been able to help, and by the time she stumbles off in the opposite direction and Esmar waves them goodbye over her shoulder, Yusuf’s entire face is wet. Only half of the tears are not his own.  
  
* * *  
  
Nicolò keeps count in his head, because it feels important, and in three days they help to rescue fifty-seven people. He does not keep count of the ones they find already dead. It is far, far more.  
  
The worst is an area called Harem, where invaders like him had built a towering citadel. Nicolò remembers it, from years ago when they were last in Aleppo. The church fell in on itself, collapsing into a pile of dust, holy objects destroyed as if they had never been there in the first place, as they never should have been. Nicolò swallows over a painful lump in his throat as he looks at it, an altar to the things he had fashioned his life around reduced to ash at his feet.  
  
“God was not punishing them,” Yusuf murmurs to him, close behind his ear so Nicolò can feel warm breath on his neck.  
  
“They should not have been here,” he answers.  
  
“No, they should not,” Yusuf agrees. “But God loves us.”  
  
“Maybe yours does. I am not sure mine is as loving as I have wanted to believe.”  
  
“Would he have torn down the rest of the city, then? Killed all these innocents, just to smite a handful of his own people for a cause they believed was his will?”  
  
“I do not know,” Nicolò admits. It all used to be so very simple. He believed what he had been told and was unquestioning in his faith. Now there are complexities that make his head hurt if he thinks about them for too long.  
  
“This was not punishment,” Yusuf repeats, as if he knows. He doesn’t, but Nicolò appreciates the gesture anyway.  
  
“Alright,” he replies.  
  
“Oh, my … Andromache, look!”  
  
Nicolò glances up at the sound, the woman’s voice that rings out to the left of them. Across the mountains of confusion and destruction, a short ways away from them but close enough to make them out, stand the two women from their dreams.  
  
Their masculine clothing is dusty and tattered like Yusuf’s and Nicolò’s. Their heads are covered in cloth, there is dirt on their faces, but it is them. Unambiguously. Nicolò has been gazing upon their faces behind his eyelids for years, for decades. He has watched for them in throngs of humanity while they pass through cities and wondered with Yusuf, debating, discussing. He would not mistake them. It would be impossible.  
  
Next to him, Yusuf inhales sharply through his nose, a sound of surprise, and the two of them stay rooted to the spot in shock as the women shout happily and rush over to them. Nicolò finds himself struggling not to reach out and touch their faces the very second they come within reaching distance of it; he’s seen them so many times and unless he is so hungry and tired that he has begun hallucinating, now the two of them are standing before them, real and solid and no longer possibly imaginary.  
  
“It’s you,” he says, stupidly, and the one with the green eyes throws her head back and laughs unceremoniously.  
  
“And it’s you!” she returns in a near-shout. “Took us long enough, didn’t it?”  
  
“You have …?” Yusuf asks, frowning and looking back and forth between them.  
  
“Dreamt of you?” the brown-eyed one finishes. “Yes, of course. Since the moment you died and were reborn.”  
  
“Did you know that we would be here?”  
  
“No. We are here to help, same as you. But of course we have been looking for you for years and years and we finally find you at a time when we were _not_ looking.” She turns to her friend with a brilliant smile, and happily says, “Andromache, here they are!”  
  
“Andromache,” Nicolò repeats, trying to pronounce the complicated syllables as easy as the woman had and failing spectacularly. “That is … an interesting name.”  
  
“I am very old,” she says, with a sardonic raise of an eyebrow. “This is Quynh. She is not quite so old, but much older than you.”  
  
“Nic – ” he begins, and is cut off immediately with an impatient wave of Andromache’s hand.  
  
“We know who you are. Come, we have many things to talk about.”  
  
* * *  
  
They stay another two days in the din of it all, until a man helping them search accidentally sees a gash on Quynh’s arm start to magically heal itself before his eyes and stares at her as if she’s suddenly grown a second head or a few extra legs. Andromache, their unspoken leader because she is the eldest and neither Yusuf nor Nicolò had thought to question it, decides immediately they are not safe in Aleppo any longer and must flee.  
  
The women have a set of horses. With a wink, Quynh hands the reins of her’s to Nicolò and hops up easily behind Andromache on the other, arms wrapping around her waist and head resting comfortably on her shoulder. Nicolò shares a glance with Yusuf. They still have so many questions, and there has not been time in all the pandemonium to acquire satisfactory answers. He climbs onto the tawny steed and Yusuf settles behind him as Quynh had, and together they ride away. Nicolò wishes they could have stayed longer, could have saved more, but he follows the women because it’s quite nice, in a way, to follow someone who seems to know where they are headed.  
  
After a day’s journey they find themselves at a clearing near the edge of a wood, similar to the one where Yusuf and Nicolò had been when the earthquake hit. Rather than their worn canvas tent, the women lead them to a small stone cabin, with an iron-bolted door and a thatched roof and a chimney protruding from it.  
  
“You have a home?” Yusuf asks from behind Nicolò on the horse, wonderment in his voice.  
  
Quynh bounces down to the ground and shrugs a shoulder as if it is nothing to marvel at. “We have many. In many different places.”  
  
“How do you protect them all, when you are away?”  
  
“We cannot,” Andromache answers. “Sometimes they are found and stolen or torn down, so we build another one somewhere else.”  
  
“You – build?” Nicolò asks, eyes widening as he tries to imagine these two, capable as they are but small, lifting stone bricks and carving furniture and tiling a floor.  
  
Quynh looks back at him, hands on her hips and an unamused expression on her face. “You are surprised we could build a house since we are women?”  
  
_Yes_ , is the true answer, but Nicolò understands he should not speak it aloud.  
  
“No,” Yusuf says, saving Nicolò from his ignorance, “we are impressed because we’ve never built anything.”  
  
“Ah, yes, you are the artist. So you create, but in a more delicate, beautiful way.”  
  
“The horses need to be watered,” Andromache says commandingly. “Can we continue this later?”  
  
Nicolò and Yusuf obediently climb off their horse, and on his way passed her with the reins in his hand, Yusuf tells Quynh, “that’s a lovely thing to say, thank you.”  
  
Nicolò does not bother trying to hide his smile.  
  
* * *  
  
The inside of the cabin is as small as it looks from outside, but comfortable. There is a bed large enough for two, with a straw mattress and woven blankets. The single window is slight, but it faces East and will let in the morning sun. There is generous hearth with racks and pots for cooking, a small table with two chairs, a wooden trunk with a hefty lock on it that neither woman addresses so neither Nicolò nor Yusuf ask about it.  
  
There is room enough on the stone floor for their bedrolls once Quynh moves the table further into the corner, although Nicolò stands with an uneasy twisting in his gut about presuming they should be allowed to sleep next to two unmarried women they have only known for a few days and still know almost nothing about.  
  
“We do have a tent,” he says, “we needn’t sleep inside if you would rather we did not.”  
  
Quynh smiles at him kindly. Nicolò instantly liked her, when they met, and it only grows the more time they spend together. “We are not scared of you, Nicolò. We’re happy to see you, we have been looking for you for a long time.”  
  
“So have we, although I doubt we were any closer to finding you than to figuring out how to get up to the moon. Our dreams were not particularly helpful.”  
  
As Nicolò speaks, Yusuf unpacks the bedrolls from their bags and sets them up in the space Quynh created for them in her home. He adds, “I would see your faces, and in the background a desert or a thatch of trees or a river. But there are trees and rivers …”  
  
“Everywhere,” Andromache finishes, nodding understandingly. “Ours were more detailed. I think they are meant to help us find you, you are only supposed to know that we are coming. Although I have only done it three times now so I could not say for sure it will always be that way.”  
  
Nicolò raises his eyebrows in surprise. “Three?”  
  
“Yes,” Andromache says heavily, and does not elaborate. “It’s a warm night, let’s sit outside.”  
  
She exits the cabin without waiting for anyone’s agreement. Quynh smiles after her, fond and dreamy. Nicolò recognizes her expression intimately. He has seen it, over and over, on Yusuf’s handsome face.  
  
Behind the cabin, in the shade of the trees, there is a well-used firepit. Andromache tosses a few cut logs onto it from a pile leaned against the stone wall and squats down with a flint in her hand, striking it only three times before it sparks and turns to bright, burning flames. Ungracefully, she falls onto her backside, tucking the flint back into her pocket and brushing her hands clean, skin smacking against skin as she does. She looks up at the other three with firelight dancing on her face, grinning at Quynh and holding out her hand, which Quynh skips forward to take. She flops down into Andromache’s lap, giggling happily and kissing her.  
  
Nicolò blinks and looks to Yusuf next to him. He’s smiling wider than Andromache had, as he walks to the other side of the fire and sinks easily down into the grass.  
  
“How long have you been together?” he asks, as if it is as casual as asking someone’s favorite food.  
  
“Centuries,” Quynh says, draping her arms over Andromache’s broad shoulders and resting her cheek on the top of Andromache’s head. “Maybe longer. It is difficult, after so much time, to continue keeping track of how much of it has gone by.”  
  
Yusuf’s eyes meet Nicolò’s and he frowns curiously as he notices Nicolò still standing, hovering a few feet away. Yusuf nods at the space on the ground next to him, and Quynh follows his eyeline and gestures for Nicolò to come over.  
  
“I promise we are kind,” she says, with a twinkle in her eye that reminds Nicolò so, so much of Yusuf.  
  
He settles next to Yusuf and is annoyed with himself for how brave he feels when he reaches over and takes Yusuf’s hand. Nicolò has struggled enough with this, with allowing himself to love Yusuf the way he wants to, with having to hide it away, with the not insignificant number of times they have been careless and caught and had to fight their way out. Sitting here, in the glow of a fire with two people on the other side of it who are just like them in so many important ways, it should not feel like a risk to take Yusuf’s hand. But it does.  
  
Andromache reaches for an iron poker and uses it one-handed to shift the logs around, stoking the fire. Still perched in her lap, Quynh’s eyes wander down to Yusuf and Nicolò’s clasped hands, and her lips curve into yet another smile.  
  
“We know what you are to each other, Nicolò,” she says softly, sensing his hesitance and striving to put him at ease. “We have seen it in our dreams.”  
  
The thought calms him for just a moment, until his mind unhelpfully supplies images of all the nights they have spent wrapped around each other in their tent or in beds above taverns. His cheeks burst into a blush at the thought that they were not entirely private moments.  
  
“I do not mean _that_ ,” Quynh assures, noticing.  
  
“Although sometimes that,” Andromache cracks, with a smirk.  
  
Lightly, Quynh smacks her on the shoulder. “Andromache! Let them have their dignity, we have only just met.”  
  
Beside him, Yusuf chuckles warmly. He brings Nicolò’s hand to his mouth and kisses the back of his palm. “He is a very insatiable man, my Nicolò, now that I have pried him from the church and taught him to sin.”  
  
Quynh and Andromache laugh and Nicolò manages to smile though the furious flush on his face. He shakes his head as Yusuf winks at him and he shuffles in closer, leaning against Yusuf’s chest and letting Yusuf hold him in plain sight of their new friends.  
  
This time, he does not feel brave. He feels at peace.  
  
When Quynh is yawning widely, Andromache douses the fire and the four of them head back into the small cabin. Nicolò hesitates at the edge of their bedrolls where Yusuf spread them on the floor, giving the women – still strangers, really – the opportunity to rescind their offer. It is a warm night; they could certainly sleep outside. They have hundreds of times before. But neither give any indication they have rethought their proposal. Andromache abruptly strips out of her tunic, revealing an undershirt and surprisingly muscular arms, and she climbs into their bed. Quynh follows her.  
  
Nicolò shares a glance with Yusuf, who shrugs his shoulders and does the same, ridding himself of his tunic and lowering himself to the floor. Nicolò is the last of them to get comfortable, but when he is settled on his side and Yusuf is tucked familiarly behind him, the tension in his frame relaxes. In every new place, he always feels at home as soon as Yusuf holds him.  
  
“Just in case you were thinking of it, it’s no use trying to kill us in our sleep,” Andromache’s voice says. Nicolò cannot see her, she lies on the far side of the bed near the wall and is blocked from view. “Remember that we cannot die.”  
  
“Andromache,” Quynh chuckles. “They are our friends.”  
  
“If we try to kill you, you are free to retaliate and try to kill us,” Yusuf suggests, and Andromache laughs as well.  
  
“Very fair. You have a deal.”  
  
Nicolò closes his eyes. For a few long minutes, silence overtakes the darkness in the cabin but sleep does not come to him. His mind is still wild, thoughts passing over each other like a den of snakes. Memories of the earthquake and its horrible aftermath in the city, the utter shock of looking across the rubble to see the women from their dreams, the fact that there is a sturdy roof over their heads as sleep evades him. He can scarcely imagine what will be next.  
  
Quynh rolls onto her side and peeks her kind face over the side of the bed. Softly, so as not to wake the others, she says, “good night, Nicolò.”  
  
He looks up at her and a small smile curves one side of his mouth. “I wish you sweet dreams.”  
  
She smiles in return. “It saddens me that we will not dream of you anymore.”  
  
“It does?”  
  
She nods. “Andromache and I have been just us two for a very long time. And then the most beautiful love story began to play out behind my eyes every few nights. I will miss it.”  
  
“Oh.” Nicolò breathes, allowing her words to wash over him like a current. “I suppose I will too. I never …”  
  
Quynh shifts again. She brings her hand up, propping her head on it and resting on her elbow so she can more easily look down upon him. “Tell me.”  
  
Although he has only known her a few days, Nicolò feels as if she is someone he can trust, and so he does. “The world that I lived in, when I was mortal, I never knew that love could be anything but what the Church said it was.”  
  
“I know,” she says understandingly. “Ofttimes the world is cruel.”  
  
Nicolò glances carefully behind himself, to see Yusuf fast asleep with his nose tucked into the back of his neck. He takes Yusuf’s hand, pulling it more snug across his chest. When he glances back up, Quynh is smiling again.  
  
“He adores you,” she whispers.  
  
Nicolò knows that to be true, and it warms him as it always does. He tells her, “seeing you and Andromache in our dreams, it made me feel that freedom was possible, for people like us. People who do not belong anywhere.”  
  
“You belong with us, Nicolò. And I’m so happy we finally found you.”  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [1138 Aleppo earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1138_Aleppo_earthquake)   
>  [1068 Near East Earthquake](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1068_Near_East_earthquake)


	3. Paris, 1248

_“Lovers ultimately do not meet somewhere, they are in each other all along.”_  
 _Rumi, 1246_  
  
  
Yusuf finds Andromache in the kitchens, with grease on her apron, dirt on her cheek, and a murderous scowl on her face. She is stalking away from one of the cooks, having undoubtedly just been reprimanded for one indiscretion or another. She is not, as Yusuf could have very easily predicted, particularly good at this – at playing the maid and taking direction and not being in charge. She has a long and impressive skill-set but curtseying and nodding politely and being deferential, especially to men, appear nowhere on that lengthy list.  
  
She had not much of a choice this time; none of them did. Within the towering walls of the King’s Paris estate, none but Nicolò have the physical qualities necessary to work his way into the monarch’s inner circle, so this is his task. The other three are relegated to supporting players, there mostly to keep Nicolò safe, with Andromache and Quynh in the kitchens and Yusuf in the stables with the fleet of horses. They have been here for weeks and Nicolò, clever man that he is, has yet to garner a direct audience with the King but has managed to enamor himself to several men who are close to him. Close enough, as Yusuf is here to tell their own leader, to have some idea of what’s being planned. Although unfortunately, it is not welcome news.  
  
He catches her eye and motions to her, slinking back into the shadowy hallway and waiting for her to slip out and join him. He will be yelled at if he tries to get into the kitchens. He had discovered that on their second day here, much to his displeasure. They have taken odd jobs over the last century so they can afford food and lodgings and new clothes but he has never been a _servant_ before. He decided quickly that he would never like to be one again. He would also like to never wear a short coat again. It does not fit him properly and it restricts his movement, which is supposed to be the very opposite of its purpose. Dress in European courts seems to be more about displaying one’s station than functionality and Yusuf is instantly tired of it.  
  
“The plan is to march to the port of Damietta,” Yusuf says in a low voice, as soon as Andromache joins him in a dark corner, brushing flour off her long surcoat.  
  
Her forehead twists into a deep frown. “Egypt?”  
  
“Nicolò overheard this morning.”  
  
She looks as confused as he had been, when Nicolò had found him in the stables and relayed the new information. (Afterward, Nicolò had pressed him up against the wooden side of a stall and kissed him breathless, the feel of his priestly costume under Yusuf’s hands adding an extra thrill of danger to it. He does not feel the need to repeat that part of it to Andromache, even though she would likely thoroughly enjoy hearing all about it.)  
  
“There is not much that’s holy for Christians in Egypt,” she says slowly, shaking her head back and forth. “That does not make sense.”  
  
“I suppose reclaiming the Holy Land is not their goal, anymore. They just wish to terrorize my people.” Yusuf feels every inch of his earlier realization weighing on him. He had believed – or wanted to believe, for Nicolò’s sake – that the men who led him into war a century ago had been genuine in their intentions but misguided, or ignorant. It is much more difficult to keep hoping that is the case if Kings are going to begin sending armies to centers of Islamic power that are not Jerusalem.  
  
Andromache sighs audibly and a muscle works in her jaw. She does not argue with him, she only looks as angry as Yusuf feels. “Alright. I will find Quynh and let her know.”  
  
“If …” Yusuf pauses, pressing a hand to his own forehead where a headache is throbbing underneath his skull. He is the very opposite of excited to admit that maybe this task is impossible, but they are all in danger every time they expose themselves like this so it must be worth the risk. Perhaps this time it’s not.  
  
“Yusuf, we can still stop it,” Andromache says to him, knowing what he’s thinking before he has even said it. She is eerily skilled at that.  
  
“Can we?” he asks, dropping his hand down to his side where it smacks against his hip. He had not voiced any of his frustration to Nicolò this morning, not wanting to undermine his confidence, but it’s been weighing on him ever since. “Nicolò has been working the religious angle all this time, telling anyone who will listen that he is a priest, still, and that this is not what their God would want. But if it was never _about_ that, if it is about only power and land, what leverage does he have? The Pope himself has called for this. One rogue priest is not going to change many minds.”  
  
“He does not have to change many minds, he only needs to change one,” Andromache reminds him. When Yusuf does not answer, she glances behind herself to make sure they are still alone and then she holds Yusuf’s upper arms in her hands, fingers squeezing him, and her expression shifting from annoyed to sympathetic. “I know this one feels personal, for you.”  
  
“Every one feels personal,” he argues weakly, unconvincingly.  
  
“Not like this,” she says, and she’s correct. “We are not always going to succeed. Sometimes people are going to die despite our best efforts. But we still try. Right?”  
  
Yusuf exhales and it feels almost unbearably heavy, but he nods.  
  
She squeezes his arms again in encouragement and then she hurries away with the heels of her boots clicking on the stone floor and he stands alone in the darkness for just a moment longer before he can force himself to follow her toward the stairs.  
  
Yusuf makes his way outside, sticking to the hidden corridors but catching glimpses of the main rooms as he passes by. It is a truly enormous compound on the _Île de la Cité_ , with multiple wings and courtyards, gardens, vast rooms, servants quarters, and the recently completed _Sainte-Chapelle_ the King had constructed to house the sacred relics acquired a decade earlier from Constantinople. It is more massive and more splendorous than anything Yusuf has ever seen, with silk and jewels glittering on every available surface. He cannot even in his wildest fantasies truly fathom the riches, while just on the other side of the river people divide bread between their children so everyone gets enough in their bellies to survive until morning.  
  
It would leave him too angry if he thought about it any further, so he turns away from the opulence and puts it out of his mind.  
  
It is a warm day, the sun hitting his shoulders as he makes his way across the South lawn. In the distance he spots Quynh, donning a similar dress, cap, and apron to the one he had just seen on Andromache in the kitchens. She is gathering vegetables into a flat woven basket with a few others. He approaches quickly and the others eye him warily and disperse – they are suspicious of him, nearly everyone he’s met has been, but he does not have time to bother with the hurt of that just now. In case Andromache has not found her yet, Yusuf goes to repeat the new information. Her reaction is much the same as Andromache’s, and it does little to improve Yusuf’s already sour mood.  
  
* * *  
  
It is three full days before he sees Nicolò again up close. He sees him from distances, strolling across the lawn in a group of sumptuously dressed courtiers as Yusuf shovels manure and wipes at the sweat on his brow with a dusty hand, but he must try not to stare too long and Nicolò has to pretend he does not see Yusuf at all. Because he knows him so well, Yusuf does notice the way Nicolò’s pale eyes flit toward him once or twice like he’s unable to help himself, but they move forward again just as quickly.  
  
They sleep apart, in different areas of the castle, because they must, but Yusuf misses him all the same. It is the first time in over a century that he has not slept next to Nicolò for longer than two or three evenings. It has been nearly a month, this time, and his bed is certainly more comfortable than the ground but without Nicolò there beside him it feels hard and cold and unwelcoming.  
  
As the group continues across the lawn, Nicolò is speaking animatedly, his hands in constant motion as they do sometimes when passion overtakes him. The others are exchanging cautious glances between them, and Yusuf winces, trying to silently will his love to calm himself. He cannot hear what is being said from this distance but it is a delicate business and raving about the King’s decision to his closest allies is likely not going to be entirely helpful. Nicolò does lower his hands as Yusuf watches after a moment, and a minute later they round a corner past the clocktower, and he cannot see them anymore.  
  
He sighs, roughly sticking the pitchfork into the mud and leaning back against the wooden wall behind him.  
  
* * *  
  
In the late afternoon, a boy brings him a folded note he clandestinely whispers is from _Father Nicolò_ , clearly instructed that this is a large, important secret. Yusuf thanks him and unfolds it as soon as the boy runs off. Hours later, under the cover of darkness, he follows Nicolò’s scrawled instructions and meets him with Quynh and Andromache behind the stables. Nicolò scrunches his nose in distaste as he lifts his scapular to step around the piles of mud and animal excrement, and the annoyance that has been festering in Yusuf for days threatens to boil over. Nicolò has been sleeping in silk and dining with princes for weeks while the rest of them have been run ragged like workhorses. Yusuf is sure he’s not felt truly clean since they arrived.  
  
“Have you any idea _why_ they would march to Egypt?” Quynh asks, her usually smooth forehead wrinkled up in genuine confusion.  
  
Before Nicolò can answer, Yusuf does it for him. “It is the current center of the Islamic world. The King is not after recapturing the Holy Land, he wants to simply destroy anyone who does not share his belief system.”  
  
“For what purpose?”  
  
Furiously and through clenched teeth, Yusuf says, “my people are filthy and treacherous pagans and unable to be saved, in the minds of men like him. They despise us so deeply they believe all we are good for is death. Nicolò was taught the same things.”  
  
Quynh still looks to Nicolò for confirmation, which annoys Yusuf even further, but Nicolò does nod solemnly and affirm his assertion. “He is not wrong. Louis is … fervent, in his beliefs. He sees himself as the leader of the Christian world and would like that world to be a little bigger.”  
  
“He’s mad if he thinks the people there are going to convert,” Yusuf mutters. He skin feels hot and the rage that simmers within him barely manages to keep contained under the surface. It has been a long, long time since he’s been this angry, and there is not anyone around just now to run through with his sword to make himself feel better. “He’ll have to kill them, first. Which he will.”  
  
The other three exchange glances between themselves, and carefully, Andromache asks Nicolò, “we will follow your lead, do you think there is any hope left of convincing him? Are you close at all to securing a private audience with him?”  
  
Nicolò takes a minute to consider it, and he looks at Yusuf as he does. Yusuf does not look back. Eventually, he admits, “I wish I could say yes. In truth, I’m not sure his mind could be changed. He has made it, at this point it is only about raising the funds.”  
  
“Egypt,” Quynh says, shaking her head sadly.  
  
“It seems the fall of Jerusalem is no longer a significant event in popular imagination,” Nicolò comments. “When I have raised the subject, the men seem to only barely know what I’m talking about. Taking back Jerusalem is no longer important to them.”  
  
He says it so casually, as if he does not mind one way or another whether the world remembers it, and Yusuf scoffs.  
  
“149 years.”  
  
Nicolò frowns at him. “Pardon?”  
  
Yusuf articulates it in clearer, briskly snipped tones. “One hundred and forty-nine years. That is all it took for the world to forget what happened on the day we met.”  
  
“It was not as important to others as it remains to us.”  
  
Yusuf glares at him. “A city fell. Innocent people were slaughtered. Thousands of them. Women, children, grandparents.”  
  
Nicky closes his eyes for a moment and nods solemnly. When he speaks, it is apologetically. “Yes. Mass death should not be so easily forgotten.”  
  
Understanding passes between them like a moonbeam shining between their locked eyes, and regret coils in Yusuf’s gut. Nicolò tried, Yusuf knows he did, just like he knows Nicolò is going to let the fault for their failure rest squarely on his own shoulders. Andromache was right, earlier in the week, when she said this one is personal for Yusuf, but it is also personal for Nicolò. They have not spoken of it, but Yusuf knows the one he loves, he knows this task has weighed heavily on Nicolò’s heart. He had wanted so badly to make amends, in his own mind, for mistakes he made so many years ago.  
  
“I do not blame you,” Yusuf says to him.  
  
“You are allowed to be angry with me, for my part in it.”  
  
“I love you, and I am not.”  
  
Yusuf holds out his hand. Nicolò moves closer to him slowly and wraps his arms around Yusuf’s shoulders. Yusuf kisses his cheek and holds him while Quynh sniffs.  
  
“This is not your fault, Nico,” she says kindly.  
  
“There was a time when I was angry with you,” Yusuf says. There’s no use in lying about that when they both already know it to be true. And Nicolò would not be happy if he thought he were being coddled. “Even after I loved you, a part of me was still angry with you. But that time has long since passed. If you must do penance to deserve forgiveness, as your holy book dictates, you have done more than enough. You have saved hundreds more than you ever harmed. You have earned your forgiveness, my Nicolò.”  
  
Andromache steps nearer to them and her hand slides over Nicolò’s shoulder, squeezing him comfortingly. “We will stay a while longer,” she decides, sensing his hesitance and taking the burden of choice from his hands. “This is not over until it is over. For now, we keep trying.”  
  
Yusuf nods and shares a pained glance with her, before she takes Quynh’s hand and leads her away, leaving Yusuf and Nicolò alone together.  
  
“I have tried,” Nicolò says miserably, and Yusuf’s muscles clench in his chest. He kisses Nicolò’s forehead.  
  
“I know,” he answers. “Thank you, for trying.”  
  
“Are you alright?”  
  
If it were someone else, Yusuf would pretend that he was. Instead he sighs and rests his head heavily against Nicolò’s, letting him take some of his weight. “I will be, I suppose. At some point. I never like it when we cannot save everyone. Even though that is most times. This one is no different.”  
  
“Yes, it is,” Nicolò argues gently, and Yusuf does not know why he had even attempted that much. Nicolò knows him so much better.  
  
“Yes, it is,” he agrees.  
  
Nicolò does not prompt him but he stays close, in Yusuf’s arms, and Yusuf wraps him into a tighter hold, his face pressing into Nicolò’s shoulder.  
  
“We are just people,” he says unhappily. “We are husbands and wives, daughters and sons, and they think we’re … inhuman. Savages, lower than the dirt we walk on.”  
  
“Horrible,” Nicolò agrees. His fingers curl around the back of Yusuf’s neck and he squeezes, massaging his sore muscles gently. “They know so little. I knew so little.”  
  
“I despise that we are so powerless, sometimes.”  
  
“As do I.”  
  
Nicolò accompanies Yusuf back to his room. They should not, there will be Hell to pay if they are caught, but if they have already failed to change the King’s mind Yusuf does not see the point in them staying a few days more. They will because Andromache said so, but Yusuf knows as well as Nicolò does that this is finished.  
  
The bed he has been given is barely large enough for himself and certainly far too small for two of them, but they squeeze in together as best they can. Yusuf wraps himself around Nicolò, pulling him back against his chest and cradling him in his arms, heart aching for them both, and sorry that he had been rude, earlier, even though he knows Nicolò will not be upset with him for it. Yusuf is also aware he likely stinks like manure and sweat and dirt while Nicolò smells like he’d bathed just this morning, and Yusuf entertains the thought of defying Andromache and taking Nicolò out of this place as soon as the sun rises. He would like to wash in a clear stream and hold Nicolò to his chest under the stars, so far away from civilization that no one could find them again unless they elected to be found.  
  
“Yusuf?”  
  
His voice is small, a miniscule request, one that if Yusuf were asleep already he would not have heard. He runs his nose through the soft, fine hairs at the back of Nicolò’s neck, inhaling his familiar scent. “Yes?” he answers, equally quiet and secret, even though there is no one around to overhear them. Sometimes, a moment with Nicolò feels so private that Yusuf winces at even the thought of the air around them overhearing it.  
  
Nicolò does not say anything more. For a moment it seems as if he’s about to, and then he sighs and turns his face into the pillow, hiding. “Nothing,” he whispers.  
  
Yusuf frowns. The idea of Nicolò hiding from him wraps tightly around his heart and wounds more than he would care to admit. He tightens his arms around Nicolò in response and kisses the hair in front of his lips. “Please tell me?”  
  
There is another moment of silence but then Nicolò does speak. His voice, if possible, is even smaller than before. “Do you think there is a God?”  
  
It is such an enormous question, and not anything near what Yusuf was expecting. His eyes close all on their own, as if even in darkness they cannot bear to see anymore. “I do not know,” he answers. It is the truth, although it will not be what Nicolò is searching for.  
  
“Neither do I,” Nicolò admits.  
  
Yusuf nudges him, urging Nicolò to turn over so their eyes can meet once Yusuf can force his to reopen, and after some gentle cajoling, Nicolò does. On his back, his eyes shine unhappily as he looks up at Yusuf, and for a moment all Yusuf can do is kiss him gently and hope empathy shines through it so that he does not have to voice it all aloud. They have become quite good at that.  
  
“What if there’s not?” Nicolò whispers into their kiss. “What if everyone is wrong?”  
  
Yusuf considers it. Nicolò deserves a thoughtful answer, even if Yusuf hardly knows any more about it. “I suppose … I’m not sure it matters. We did not _know_ before that our Gods existed. Not in the way that we know we have hands with fingers on them. That’s why it required faith. We believed, and we hoped, but there was always the chance we were wrong.”  
  
“The whole world.” Nicolò sniffs. He is not crying, not quite, but he’s upset and Yusuf wishes he could kiss it away. This is one thing he likely cannot. “The entire world, every place we have been and everyone we have met, it is all organized around the idea that something beyond this world is waiting. We haven’t all the same notions of what that might be but everyone believes it is _something_. And everything they do reflects that. What if we are all wrong? What’s left in this world if at the end of it there is just _nothing_?”  
  
“Love,” Yusuf murmurs to him, kissing each of his cheeks in turn. “Close friends, food and drink, newborn babies. Sunsets, warm baths, the way it feels to laugh until your sides hurt. So much is left, Nicolò. The world is full of beauty even if when our time in it ends, there is nothing after.”  
  
“Blood,” Nicolò counters. “Violence, betrayal, illness.”  
  
“Yes,” Yusuf agrees, “the world is also full of pain. But perhaps that is what makes the beautiful things beautiful. Perhaps without the darker parts, we would not know the difference.”  
  
For another long moment, Nicolò is contemplatively silent. He brings a hand up to weave his fingers through Yusuf’s curls, resting there as if they are an anchor for him on a stormy night. Yusuf waits patiently, with his forehead resting against Nicolò’s, for him to tie some knots in his mind around the threads Yusuf left.  
  
“Are you a philosopher, now?” Nicolò asks, finally, with the hint of a smile in his voice.  
  
Yusuf chuckles richly. “No.”  
  
He turns onto his back and takes Nicolò with him, the other man curling securely into Yusuf’s chest. He strokes strands of hair out of Nicolò’s eyes and lays with him, warm and comfortable.  
  
Not entirely free of that nagging anxiety, though, made plain when Nicolò quietly says, “they believe God is telling them to march. To do this all over again, when we should have learned by now.”  
  
Yusuf breathes deeply. He had known, deep down in his gut, that was the origin of Nicolò’s upset. Gently, he says, “it is not your fault, my love, if we cannot stop this from happening. You are only one man and he is a King with an army.”  
  
“Thousands will die needlessly,” Nicolò mutters.  
  
Yusuf nods regretfully. “Yes, they will. And it will be horrible, and I will be devastated that we did not succeed. But the blood of another is only on your hands if your sword took his life. You cannot blame yourself every time we try and fail to stop men from killing each other. It will consume you.”  
  
He is speaking to himself as much as to Nicolò. Yusuf needs to hear it as well, and Nicolò is not, right at this moment, able to be the one saying it.  
  
“I wish I could have stopped this. For you, and for us.” Nicolò tilts his face upwards, sad eyes meeting Yusuf’s, and Yusuf cannot take away his ache with mere words so he places a kiss instead on Nicolò’s lips.  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Seventh Crusade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventh_Crusade)   
>  [Louis IX](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_IX_of_France#Crusading)   
>  [Palais de la Cité](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_de_la_Cit%C3%A9#Louis_IX_and_Sainte-Chapelle)


	4. London, 1349

_“Time and tide wait for no man.”_  
 _Chaucer, 1395_  
  
  
Even the tallest rooftop on the square is not high enough to escape the stench. The city is soaked in death like a rag soaked in blood. Dripping with it, entirely saturated, unable to ever dry out because the blood continues to flow and the fibers cannot contain it. Everything has its capacity. Everything has a threshold after which it becomes impossible to take any more. Nicolò wonders where his own threshold lies.  
  
It stings Nicolò’s nostrils as he tries to breathe. This city usually stinks of ash and smoke and refuse but even those are overtaken by the acrid smell of pestilence. Rot and decay, corpses that line the streets, orphans who cry out over lifeless mothers. He has seen illness before, he’s seen death and destruction and violence, but not like this. Never like this. The Great Mortality, they have called it, and even that, Nicolò thinks, is not grand enough to describe the true horror of it all.  
  
The rooftop is the briefest of escapes. He will only take a moment. He needs much, much more, but there is anguish below and he must return to it before too long. A few moments to breathe, a few moments to close his eyes and imagine being magically transported back to the seaside with Yusuf where they can kiss and laugh and hold each other close in the warmth of the sun, and he will be able to carry on. For today, at the very least. Tomorrow is always a new adventure.  
  
There are soft footfalls behind him. Not Yusuf, Yusuf is heavier in his gait. Nor is it Andy, for she too, despite her smaller size, walks with purpose and determination and a thorough distaste for whatever _ladylike behavior_ might be in anyone else’s estimation. She is old enough that she does not have to care. She lived before their modern ideas and she will outlive them as they change – because they will change. Everything changes, Nicolò has learned.  
  
Unless he is about to be the victim of a rather careless pickpocket, it must be Quynh. Nicolò has nothing on him for them to steal, but he is exhausted from the day’s struggle, so he’s happy when it is his friend who sits down beside him and not a thief.  
  
She dangles her feet over the edge of the building, hands folded in her lap and shoulders slumped. For a moment, they just sit. Her clothing is covered in blood and other fluids, as is Nicolò’s, and none of it is their own. It is much worse that way, Nicolò has decided. He does not enjoy being wounded, far from it, but at least his wounds heal. At least they melt away to nothing and the blood left on his clothes is the only reminder that it happened at all, not months of pain and healing and perhaps a lifelong limp. At least he cannot pass on to whatever’s waiting after this world – if it’s anything at all – and leave the ones who love him behind.  
  
In times like this, sometimes Nicolò wishes he could pass on. But then he thinks of leaving Yusuf alone, and the thought squeezes so tightly around his windpipe that he cannot draw in a proper breath until he ceases thinking of it.  
  
“She’s gone,” Quynh tells him, speaking of the young woman in the room across the road they had been treating.  
  
Nicolò wishes he were surprised. It is not working, the treatments the physicians have dreamt up that Yusuf and Nicolò have learned so that they can help. Physicians are mortal. All their robes and masks and posies cannot make that untrue, it can only delay it for a while. They are dying themselves, as are the clergymen who bravely – or purely out of duty – hear final confessions from the damned only to contract the pestilence from those whose souls they save. Nicolò has tried and failed to keep that from bothering him.  
  
The bloodletting, the sweating, the forced expulsion of their stomachs, none of it works. Now and then some cursed soul does improve, their boils growing smaller and their spirits lifting, and the surviving physicians congratulate each other as if their intervention was the deciding factor. Nicolò keeps his lips sealed because there would be no point in dampening their brief moments of victory. He knows, though, that they are wrong. If their techniques worked, they would work on everyone. A handful of survivors, while there are mountains made from putrefying corpses visible through the cloudy windows, is not evidence of successful medical treatment.  
  
“We are not helping,” he says, after a long stretch of tense silence between them. He expects her to argue, for her perpetual cheer to shine through even this darkest night, but it does not. That is so much worse than Nicolò would have guessed.  
  
“No,” she agrees quietly. “We’re not.”  
  
“What else can we do?” he asks, letting the desperation seep into his voice because she is his friend, his sister, and he needn’t hide it from her. She understands.  
  
“I am not sure there’s anything.” She sniffs and wipes at her nose with the back of her hand. It leaves a smear of someone else’s blood along her cheek, marring her beautiful face. Within her body, as within Nicolò’s, the illness gathers and swarms and attempts to take them as well, but it cannot. Their bodies reject it, fighting it back before it can take hold. “We are not all-powerful, just because we cannot die. There are many things we are not able to do. We only lend our assistance where we can, until it ends.”  
  
“Will this ever end?”  
  
“It has to, one way or another. Either people will begin to heal, or …”  
  
“Or they will all die. And we four will be the only souls left on the entire island.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
Nicolò’s teeth press together, clenching until his bones ache. Quynh shifts in closer to him and her head tips to the side, resting against his shoulder. Nicolò wants to scream at the top of his lungs into the muggy air. He wants to leap down from this rooftop, to let his body break on the cobblestones below, just to feel something other than this anguish. He does neither. He lifts his arm and puts it around Quynh instead, encouraging her to snuggle closer to him.  
  
“Yusuf broke a chair against the floor,” Quynh mumbles, “when her heart finally gave out. Raging about those with means having escaped to the countryside where they can be safe, and the poor left here to suffer and die.”  
  
Nicolò brushes a hand over his hair, cropped close to his skull and bristly against his fingers. It hurts in his heart to think of Yusuf so upset, but he feels that same rage just as intensely and he knows Quynh does as well. There have been many times in these last months he has wanted to smash something, or just scream as loud as he can manage for as long as his breath will let him. This is not something he could make better by pulling Yusuf into his arms and kissing his forehead. He can share in his anger, but he cannot take it away.  
  
“I love him,” Nicolò whispers. “Sometimes I love him so much I feel I will drown in it.”  
  
“He loves you in return. It is unmistakable. Every time he looks at you, I can see it.” Her words warm him from the inside.  
  
“And Andromache? Is she alright?” he asks. Their oldest friend is a different breed than the rest of them, it seems sometimes. Where Yusuf and Nicolò struggle, she seems to slide effortlessly along the surface like a flat stone skipped over a still pond. She seems so untouchable, and Nicolò wishes he could understand it so he, too, could remain unaffected by the endless tragedy.  
  
“I know what you think.”  
  
“What do I think?”  
  
“That she doesn’t care, when people are dying and we are unable to stop it.”  
  
Nicolò closes his eyes, turning his nose into Quynh’s silky black hair. He has entertained that thought, although he burns in shame, now, to have it said so plainly.  
  
“She cares,” Quynh insists. “She feels it all so strongly. It is why she does this, it’s why she brought me along with her, and now you. She could spend her immortality eating and drinking and lounging about, and instead she tries to help people. She is old enough that she has learned to keep the upset from taking over her entire mind, but that does not mean it’s not there at all.”  
  
Her arms wrap around his middle and he nods into the top of her head.  
  
“We try,” she whispers, answering a question he had not asked. “We try until there is nothing more we can do, and then we let fate run its course and we find somewhere else to be helpful.”  
  
“I know,” he whispers back.  
  
It does little to make their current surroundings less horrible, but he does know. It will end, like she said, one way or another, and when it does, the four of them will walk hand-in-hand toward something new.  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Black Death in England](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_England)


	5. Florence, 1462

_“Oh ye seekers after perpetual motion, how many vain chimeras have you pursued? Go and take your place with the alchemists.”_  
 _Leonardo da Vinci, 1494_  
  
  
The morning is brighter than the last, the sun reflecting in a sea of high windows and sending light cascading around the square. Yusuf sits on their third-floor terrace, teacup in hand, sipping and watching the early-morning bustle on the streets below. Women with their washing and small children in tow, dragging their feet. Smartly dressed men on their way to conduct their business. The market stalls opening, wares spread on tabletops and hung from hooks so passersby can browse as they please. Yusuf is in need of more canvas, but they’ll need a few days’ work before they can afford it. Contrary to what Nicolò sometimes indignantly insists, supplies for Yusuf’s art are not nearly as important as food.  
  
A flock of small birds flies past in Yusuf’s eyeline and he follows them with his gaze, watching them swoop and twirl and then settle on a sandstone roof across the road. He can hear them easily in the morning stillness, pleasantly melodic in their song. He sips again at his tea and inhales deeply, the air drawn into his lungs fresh and warm. He’d slept well, in a comfortable bed with Nicolò against him, and as he rolls his shoulders back it is not with the ache of stiff muscles but the pleasant stretching of relaxation.  
  
The door behind him creaks quietly and Nicolò’s footsteps approach. Yusuf feels him before he’s touched, before Nicolò is leaning down and wrapping his arms around Yusuf’s shoulders from behind. His face buries in Yusuf’s neck, breath tickling his skin.  
  
Yusuf’s lips curve into a smile. He reaches back with his empty hand, tangling his fingers into Nicolò’s soft hair. It’s longer these days than it has been in a good while. When they go out, he parts it down the middle and combs it straight so that a hat sits properly on top of it. Just now, it’s messy from sleep, and like silk between Yusuf’s wandering fingers.  
  
“Good morning, caro mio,” he says.  
  
Nicolò hums pleasantly, the sound rumbling through him and into Yusuf like water soaking through a strip of cloth. “Why did you not wake me?”  
  
“Because you looked so peaceful.”  
  
Of the two of them, Yusuf is by far the heavier sleeper. He dreams rarely, he does not lie awake in the middle of the night, he rouses slowly and stays muddled for longer in the mornings. He sleeps like a brick. Nicolò sleeps like a feather perched precariously on a tower of pebbles; ready at any moment to jolt awake and leap to his feet and defend them with his capable fists or with the knife he keeps under his pillow.  
  
This morning, it had been the opposite. Yusuf had risen with the sun, to find Nicolò still dead to the world, hair a messy halo around his head and his mouth relaxed and his forehead smooth in a lack of worry. Yusuf always wants to be near him, but he hadn’t the heart to steal the tranquility of the moment from him.  
  
“What is the time?”  
  
Yusuf points across the square to the clocktower. “Nearly half past nine.”  
  
Nicolò elects not to respond. His lips kiss at Yusuf’s neck and Yusuf’s smile grows, tugging gently at Nicolò’s hair.  
  
“What shall we get up to, today?”  
  
With another musing hum, Nicolò regretfully states, “we are in need of florins, if we wish to keep food on our table.”  
  
“Indeed,” Yusuf agrees.  
  
“However, I am not particularly inclined to embark on a day’s labor this morning.”  
  
“Oh, no?”  
  
“No.”  
  
“What are you inclined to, then?”  
  
Nicolò’s lips move, sliding along Yusuf’s bare cheek, tongue joining them to leave warm, damp tracks along Yusuf’s skin. His hand slides down, palm pressing into the center of Yusuf’s chest as it moves toward his stomach, which flips in excitement the lower it gets.  
  
“I would like you back in bed,” Nicolò murmurs to him.  
  
Yusuf’s eyes close as that hand moves between his legs, Nicolò cupping him lightly over his dark blue hose and squeezing, just a tease, just enough to be a flirtatious promise of something more and then he’s gone. His hand is gone, the warmth at Yusuf’s back is gone, and he is left shivering even though the morning is warm.  
  
Yusuf growls deep in his throat and pushes up out of the chair. He leaves his teacup balanced on the stone ledge of their terrace, stomping around the chair and back into their modest room. Nicolò is on the bed, bare and leaned back enticingly on his elbows. His clear eyes are hooded in desire and his head is tilted playfully to one side. For a moment, only a moment, Yusuf just looks at him. Drinks him in with his gaze, follows along the smooth, pale lines of his chest and stomach, his bare feet on the floor, the pink of his lips as his tongue slips out to wet them.  
  
He walks slowly toward his prize as a predator approaches his prey. He teases, as Nicolò had done to him, making him wait a moment before Yusuf finally reaches out to drag light fingertips up his thigh. “It is the day of your Lord,” Yusuf reminds, grinning to himself when Nicolò’s eyes roll impatiently in their sockets. “Is this not blasphemy?”  
  
“Would I care if it were?” Nicolò returns defiantly. He reaches up with one hand, and Yusuf threads their fingers together and lets Nicolò pull on him until he’s kneeling over the man and can lean down to brush their noses together.  
  
“Perhaps you should.”  
  
“Perhaps I don’t.” Nicolò captures his mouth in a kiss that burns like a flame, searing in an instant and then growing between them as his tongue searches Yusuf’s mouth. A tingle runs down his spine as the embrace deepens, so familiar and yet thrilling. “You are my religion. I worship at your altar. You save me, Yusuf. Nothing else.”  
  
“Giuseppe,” Yusuf reminds, grinning when Nicolò rolls his eyes again as he could easily have predicted.  
  
“I will call you that when we are out in the street and I have no choice,” Nicolò says. “Not here.”  
  
“I suppose that is acceptable.”  
  
Nicolò had loudly protested the name-change, although they both knew it was necessary for Yusuf to remain inconspicuous in Florence. With short hair, a shaven face, and the proper clothing, he can pass for a Florentine who has spent a little too much time in the sun, but his name would give him away instantly. Giuseppe was the closest equivalent. Nicolò has hated the name since he was a boy and there was an old man called Giuseppe in his village who always smelled of wine and frightened the children because he was missing an eye and half his left ear.  
  
“Move up,” Yusuf says, nudging Nicolò toward the pillows at the ornate headboard. Nicolò obeys, shuffling toward them and resting his head on one, reaching for Yusuf.  
  
Yusuf makes him wait just a moment longer. He climbs backwards off the bed and makes a secret performance of removing his loose linen shirt, watching the heat grow in Nicolò’s eyes as they take in Yusuf’s chest and arms. When he crawls back towards his love, he lets the tip of his nose drag along the inside of a pale thigh, across his hip and stomach, up the center of his chest. He leaves kisses along as he goes, the heat of Nicolò wrapping around him like a blanket.  
  
Nicolò takes Yusuf’s cheeks in his hands and brings him up for a proper kiss. When Yusuf lowers himself to cover Nicolò’s body with his own, the heat between their legs finds the contact they both ache for and Yusuf cannot be sure which one of them it is who moans low in his throat. He feels it rumble through them both all the same.  
  
He has noticed it, of course. The way that Nicolò scowls when they pass a church or encounter a holy man. The way he seeks out Yusuf’s touch in moments where he doubts himself, as if it can absolve him of the feeling. The way he seems especially at peace when he takes Yusuf into his mouth, as if there is something divine in it for him. Something reminiscent of prayer, that he has found in a new activity. He has only never spoken the words aloud, and Yusuf finds they fill him with warmth and sunshine.  
  
“I worship at your altar, as well,” Yusuf tells him, kissing the spot between his eyebrows.  
  
“Get on with it, then,” Nicolò says impatiently, and Yusuf grins as he kisses along the soft hair on his jaw.  
  
There is nothing he loves more than these moments, when Nicolò desires him and so bravely asks for what he desires, _takes_ what he desires, brazen and unashamed. Yusuf is never so proud of him, of the distance they have covered together, of the life they have built for each other.  
  
Nicolò’s chest heaves as Yusuf litters it with kisses and gentle nips of his teeth and soothing swipes of his tongue. Yusuf is learning to paint while they’ve been in Florence but Nicolò was his first canvas. Every mark he leaves does not last for long but that has never stopped him from leaving them. He sucks small, purple bruises into the beautiful, pale expanse of Nicolò’s chest and stomach, and watches, enraptured, as they bloom and then quickly fade away.  
  
Though he’s squirming by the time Yusuf gets to his navel, Yusuf does not take pity on Nicolò. He bathes him in exquisite torture, so sure after so many years of the most sensitive places. So sure of the way Nicolò will quiver when Yusuf neglects the need between his legs for just long enough, just enough time to have his fingers grasping at the short strands of Yusuf’s hair and nonsense spilling from his lips as he begs for more.  
  
“You bastard,” Nicolò pants, and Yusuf smiles, satisfied.  
  
“Is this not what you wanted?” he asks innocently, running his nose along the inside of Nicolò’s creamy thigh and following it with his tongue. He is so warm, here, and Yusuf can smell him, thick and fragrant, watering his mouth.  
  
“I have half a mind to flip us over and take you myself if you do not get on with it,” Nicolò mutters murderously.  
  
Yusuf shivers himself, throbbing needily in his own groin, at the thought of it. It had not been in his plan, but now that Nicolò’s spoken the words, it is precisely what Yusuf wants. Nicolò is ravishing in that way, when he hungers, when he needs, when he presses Yusuf into the bed and folds him in half and takes his pleasure.  
  
“I would certainly not be opposed,” Yusuf tells him, treating Nicolò’s other thigh to the same infuriating tease. It is teasing, meant to rile and frustrate, but of course Nicolò also has simply heavenly thighs and Yusuf could happily kiss and bite at them for the rest of the morning.  
  
Nicolò twitches as Yusuf’s cheek grazes the soft swell of his bollocks, so Yusuf does it a second time, pretending it to be an accident but likely not fooling the man beneath him who knows him so well.  
  
“Yusuf, I swear …”  
  
“One moment longer,” Yusuf promises, “then you may exact your revenge.”  
  
He greets Nicolò’s lovely pink cock as an old friend he has been separated from for far too long. He settles between those soft thighs, finding his target nestled in a bed of dark curls and kissing the swollen, wet head of it gently. “Hello, darling. I have longed for you since we’ve been apart. Nothing has been the same.”  
  
Nicolò snorts, joyous in laughter, all annoyance gone. “It has been mere hours.”  
  
“Torturous hours. Agonizing hours,” Yusuf corrects. He rubs his nose along the underside where a blue vein is visible through the thin pink skin. “Every passing minute was an eternity.”  
  
“You are ridiculous,” Nicolò tells him. “Come up here and kiss me again or I will not let you touch it for a week.”  
  
Yusuf gasps, pretending to be scandalized just to hear Nicolò’s deep, rumbling laugh again. He kisses the warm cock once more and whispers to it, “do not worry, I shall be right back,” before he kisses his way up Nicolò’s body and finds his lips.  
  
“Ridiculous man,” Nicolò repeats, bursting with fondness as he holds Yusuf’s face in his hands.  
  
“You are the one who loves a ridiculous man,” Yusuf reminds him, and Nicolò hums happily as Yusuf drags wet lips along his cheek.  
  
“Madly,” Nicolò confirms. “I had no choice in the matter, I’m afraid. You were a force of nature and I was simply human.”  
  
Yusuf takes Nicolò’s plump lower lip into his mouth, and Nicolò takes advantage of his momentary distraction. In a whirl of sudden movement Nicolò makes good on his threat and has Yusuf underneath him, pressing him into the mattress and kissing him deeply. Yusuf’s head spins, swimming in the sensations as if he had drunk far too much wine, as Nicolò’s tongue enters his mouth and explores him. Nicolò’s strong thigh slips between Yusuf’s legs and he rocks forward, and Yusuf has to bite back a curse as it rubs against his cock.  
  
“You had more – ” he pauses to moan as Nicolò nips at his neck “ – than half a mind to flip us over and take me yourself.”  
  
“Much more,” Nicolò agrees with a devilish smile. As he spreads damp kisses along Yusuf’s neck and collarbones he murmurs, “you are too delicious to resist, my Yusuf. You feel too heavenly around me, when your body lets mine in, how am I to keep from aching for it?”  
  
“Mm.” Yusuf tangles his fingers in Nicolò’s hair, nails scratching lightly along his scalp. “You aren’t, I suppose.”  
  
Nicolò’s hands wander, tugging at Yusuf’s clothes, raising up off him for just long enough for Yusuf to wiggle out of his bottoms so they are bare against each other when Nicolò settles back against him. Nicolò’s cock, hot and stiff, slides next to Yusuf’s in the protective cradle of their stomachs, and Yusuf sees stars behind his eyes. He grasps Nicolò’s backside in his hands and squeezes, encouraging those slow, tantalizing rolls of his hips. He could – and has, hundreds of times – finish just like this, with Nicolò’s tongue in his mouth and their bodies rutting together. This time, it is not what he wants.  
  
He reaches, having to break their kiss to feel blindly for the vial of oil on the nightstand, returning to Nicolò’s mouth as soon as he has it and pressing the cool glass into Nicolò’s arm.  
  
“Do you know, I used to dream of you. Of this,” Nicolò says to him as he takes it. He shifts southward, leaving kisses along Yusuf’s chest and stomach as he goes, and briefly taking the purple head of Yusuf’s cock into his wickedly talented mouth. His tongue swirls, heat and suction, and Yusuf’s eyes flutter closed as pleasure fills him. It disperses from his groin and travels in tendrils out along his limbs.  
  
“Just there,” he moans, Nicolò’s tongue moving over sensitive notches, playing his body like a finely crafted instrument.  
  
When Nicolò hums, Yusuf can feel it everywhere and another pleasured sound falls from his lips. He is too lost in the rapture of it to notice Nicolò removing the stopper from the vial and coating his fingers, and so it is a surprise when the tip of one pets gently at his entrance, spreading the slick around between his buttocks.  
  
“Open for me,” Nicolò requests and Yusuf spreads his legs wide, knees pulled up to his chest so Nicolò can see him, all of him.  
  
The day when they hid modestly from each other has long, long since past. Yusuf knows every inch of Nicolò and Nicolò knows him in return.  
  
Reverently, Nicolò whispers, “you are so beautiful. You take me so beautifully, amore mio.”  
  
A single finger breaches him, slipping easily past the resistance of his rim and sliding inside. Yusuf clenches around it, the feel of it so familiar, but such a fraction of what’s to come that he instantly pushes back against Nicolò’s hand, wanting more.  
  
“We have time,” Nicolò says.  
  
“We do not need time. The quicker you take me, the quicker we can recover so that I can have you,” Yusuf argues. He loses the thought on the burst of internal flames as Nicolò’s fingertip brushes against the spot inside, massaging it and sending the fire along Yusuf’s veins.  
  
“I never tire of watching you respond,” Nicolò murmurs. “Seeing your desire, knowing I am the cause of it.”  
  
“Always you,” Yusuf responds. Slowly, too slowly, Nicolò teases the entrance of a second finger and Yusuf reminds, “it isn’t necessary to be so careful with me. You remember I heal.”  
  
Nicolò makes a sound of agreement and drags the flat of his tongue along Yusuf’s hip. “Yes, you heal. That does not mean I wish to be the thing you must heal from.”  
  
Yusuf is about to argue back when the second finger pushes into him and he forgets all but the feel of it, the deep stretch, the ache, the intensity of pleasure when Nicolò strokes him inside. His cock leaks heavily against his stomach and Nicolò notices and laps it up like a cat, as his fingers carve Yusuf out from the inside, sculpting him, shaping him into what Nicolò needs from him. Creating space for himself, a warm, welcoming cavern for him to sink into, as they fold into each other’s bodies and become one.  
  
“There,” Yusuf moans again as the spot is lovingly assaulted, “oh, there, Nicolò.”  
  
“I know,” Nicolò answers. His eyes are head-lidded and darkened, longing apparent on his face. “Are you ready for more?”  
  
“I have been ready for more for three hundred years,” Yusuf gripes at him, smiling up at the plaster ceiling when Nicolò laughs.  
  
“I will take that as a compliment.”  
  
“Take it however you please, just put your cock in me while you do it.”  
  
“So impatient,” Nicolò chastises, teasing as Yusuf had before, until his fingers slip from Yusuf’s body. He clenches around empty space, instantly missing the stretch, but he is left empty for only moments before the blunt head of Nicolò’s cock is breaching him.  
  
With a breathless groan, Yusuf’s body takes him in. The ache of it is blinding and exquisite, and Yusuf reaches for his lover and pulls him up so they can kiss as their bodies meld. Nicolò is panting with the effort of it by the time his hips press to Yusuf’s backside, sharing the moist air between them, his cock completely sheathed in Yusuf where he can keep it safe. He wants, more than anything in this world, to always keep Nicolò safe.  
  
“Dreamt of what?” he asks when he can speak again, recalling to a conversation left unfinished because Yusuf had been distracted by Nicolò’s mouth.  
  
Nicolò drags himself out slowly and pushes back in, large and burning hot, and Yusuf wraps his legs around Nicolò’s waist.  
  
“This,” Nicolò answers. He kisses the corner of Yusuf’s mouth and keeps his pace, leisurely and torturous. “Of you, like this. In the before, when we were simply travellers. Before the first time we ever kissed.”  
  
“A priest dreaming of putting his cock in my ass?” Yusuf jokes, running his hands over Nicolò’s wide shoulders. “How scandalous.”  
  
Nicolò smiles fondly at him. “Perhaps not this _exactly_. But I wanted you. Longed for you. Wanted you to touch me, kiss me, take me.”  
  
Yusuf inhales emotionally at the very idea of it.  
  
“They were so vivid, the dreams, and then I would wake up with my cock stiff underneath the blanket and you warm at my back and I wanted … _Christ_ , Yusuf, I wanted to pull your hand down from my chest, to wrap around that hardness, to drag me into ecstasy.”  
  
His thrusts quicken and Yusuf shudders, nails leaving marks on Nicolò’s back that will disappear in an instant. “You could have,” he rasps. “I wanted it, too.”  
  
“At first it felt so sinful, it felt as if the ground would open and I would fall down into Hell just for thinking it.” Nicolò rests his forehead against Yusuf’s, sweat dripping onto him and cock a relentless pounding into his body.  
  
“And then?”  
  
“And then I longed to feel that it was alright. That you could desire me in return, that it wasn’t evil, that we could be happy together.”  
  
“We are,” Yusuf whispers. “I love you more than the sun and the moon and all the stars, fifty times over.”  
  
“I love you more than I could say,” Nicolò whispers back, “if I spoke every language that has ever existed and a hundred more.”  
  
* * *  
  
The following day, Nicolò finds the opportunity for a day’s wages at the shipyard on the river. Yusuf kisses him goodbye in the morning, promising to make him something delicious for the evening meal when he returns.  
  
Yusuf passes an hour sketching a handful of olives he’s arranged on the table, pressing the side of a bit of charcoal into a spare scrap of parchment. He has improved since they’ve been here, with time for the first time in a long while to simply practice instead of running from one calamity to the next. It is nearing six months since the last time either of them were injured, mortally or otherwise. Yusuf is beginning to miss the satisfaction of helping others, but he certainly does not miss pain.  
  
He has made friends with an older man, Giovanni, who has been patient enough to let Yusuf spend weeks pestering him with questions about his own art, about the new movements and their influences. Last week, he began teaching Yusuf to paint with Piero della Francesca’s technique of using light and depth to his works, so that they seem almost as if the finished canvas is a scene before his very eyes that he could simply step into. Drawing lines on diagonal, at certain, intentional angles, makes a road appear to disappear into the distance. Yusuf has never seen such magic. He has taken to haunting their terrace and simply watching the street below, committing to his mind the people, their clothing, their activities, so that he can paint them later from memory.  
  
Florence is thriving, the city dripping in wealth thanks to a fortuitous location along vital trade routes. Groups of artists decorate the city, under the patronage of wealthy families, and Giovanni has been hired to paint a fresco in the church of San Francesco. He pays Yusuf a small amount to assist him. Today, they are in his home instead. Yusuf is thumbing through a sketchbook he finds lying on a dresser, eyes wide and eager as he examines the artful strokes of experimentation with different styles and techniques. Next to him, Giovanni sips a glass of strong wine and stares off into the empty air before him, lost in thought.  
  
“What is this?” Yusuf asks.  
  
Giovanni leans over to look, and Yusuf holds the book out so that he can see. On the page Yusuf is holding open, there is a crude sketch of a wheel consisting of tilted spokes.  
  
“Ah,” Giovanni says with a wrinkled smile, “Bhāskara’s wheel of perpetual motion.”  
  
Yusuf blinks at him. “Am I to know what that means?”  
  
Giovanni holds out his hand for the book, so that he can point at the sketch. “These spokes are partially filled with mercury. When it’s spun, the movement of the mercury continues it spinning as it slides back and forth, longer than it would without it.”  
  
“Oh.” Yusuf remains mired in his confusion, but he is not sure if he should say so. He worries sometimes, about asking too many questions and becoming a nuisance.  
  
Giovanni notices. “We take our energy from food and sleep, yes? If we do not have enough, we are much slower, and if we have none, we die.”  
  
Yusuf takes the inside of his cheek gently between his teeth and nods. For him, no, that is not quite true, but of course it is for everyone else.  
  
“Trees and flowers take their energy from water and the soil. A boulder rolling down a hill is pulled by the same force that would make this book fall to the floor if I let it go. A river takes its energy by being drawn toward the sea. Everything that moves needs a source of energy in order to do so. The idea of the machine is that it moves by creating its own internal energy, not requiring any outside sources.” Giovanni taps the page again. “This one was designed by a mathematician in India, three centuries ago. He claimed once it started spinning, it could run forever.”  
  
“And did it?”  
  
Giovanni shakes his head. “Sadly, no.”  
  
Yusuf looks back at the drawing, sketched in Giovanni’s own hand, copied from some place he had seen the design. “Is it possible?”  
  
“Not so far. Many have tried.” Giovanni turns the page. On the next there is another wheel, this one suspended in a rectangular structure and with pieces hanging off it. At the top of the page, Giovanni has written _Perpetuum Mobile_. “Imagined by Villard de Honnecourt, in Picardy. I do not know that he ever built it, it was just a design.”  
  
Taking in the sketch, Yusuf tries to imagine a wheel spinning and never stopping. The sun always rises, the ocean currents always move. Few other things in his long, long life have been constant. Everything changes. “It would go forever? If it were possible?”  
  
“That is the theory. But thus far it is just that, a theory.”  
  
Yusuf looks back down at the page. Again, he cannot in his mind materialize the concept of _forever_. Nothing lasts forever, he knows that. Lykon did not heal, well before Yusuf or Nicolò were born, which means they will all be gone someday. Yusuf has been haunted, since Andromache told them the tale, with the worry that his or Nicolò’s time will come well before the other’s, and one of them will be left alone for longer than they can bear. He hopes that since they came into immortality together, they will leave it together, but he cannot be sure and the uncertainty plagues him.  
  
A wheel cannot die, because it was never alive in the first place. But then, if it spins all on its own and it spins forever, maybe it is alive. Maybe his understanding of life and death is too small.  
  
“Giuseppe,” Giovanni says.  
  
Yusuf startles and looks up into the concerned blue eyes of his friend.  
  
“Do not pay it too much mind,” the man says, reaching to take the book from Yusuf’s hands and closing it. “I have been interested in the idea of perpetual motion but you would do well to not let yourself become consumed with it. Men have been lost to madness, imagining things that can never be. Come, let us work.”  
  
* * *  
  
The sun is already beginning to set when Yusuf is walking home. The wind has grown stronger and he tugs his cloak tighter around his shoulders against the bite of it. There is light spilling from the windows of their room as he enters the building on the first floor and heads for the staircase. When he enters, Nicolò is at the table, slicing figs and tossing them into a ceramic bowl.  
  
He looks up as Yusuf closes the door behind himself and smiles at him. His hair is damp; he must have just come from the bath and then given up on waiting for Yusuf to begin preparing the meal he had promised.  
  
“I’m sorry, my love,” Yusuf tells him. He hangs his cloak on a hook by the door and crosses the room to take Nicolò’s face in his hands and kiss his lips in an additional apology. “I said I would cook for you, and then I was late.”  
  
“It’s no trouble.” Nicolò blinks and continues smiling. “If you’d like to help, you can chop some oregano to mix with the oil.”  
  
Yusuf nods and takes up his task, finding another knife to roughly break the small green leaves into smaller pieces. “How was your day?”  
  
“Long,” Nicolò says with a tired exhale. “I appreciate the wages but lifting heavy things all day long is not the most enjoyable way to earn them.”  
  
Yusuf clicks his tongue sympathetically. “Next time, it’s my turn. Although Giovanni paid me a little extra today, so we can wait awhile until we have to earn more.”  
  
Nicolò hums contentedly. “And your day?”  
  
Yusuf presses his lips together for a moment and considers the question. When Nicolò raises a curious eyebrow in his direction, Yusuf tells him about the wheels. About the imagined machines of perpetual motion, about the creation of internal energy sources, about the idea of _forever_. When he finishes, Nicolò is looking thoughtfully down at his figs, as if the concept is being turned over and over in his mind as he tries to pin it down. Yusuf understands the feeling. It has been hours since he’d seen the drawings and he still cannot fully make sense of it.  
  
“Perhaps it is us,” Nicolò says finally.  
  
“Mm?” Yusuf queries.  
  
The knife is set down on the block. Nicolò stands, rounding the table and settling himself in Yusuf’s lap. His arms drape around Yusuf’s shoulders and he places a kiss to the corner of his mouth. “We do not die. We prefer to have food and sleep but we would live without it. We keep moving. Perhaps alone we would be unable to continue but we are not alone. We sustain each other.”  
  
Yusuf tries the suggestion on like a coat in his mind and finds he quite likes the feel of it. “The smartest men in the world all scratching their heads, trying to solve this puzzle, and all along it is just you and I?”  
  
“They would not believe in us if they knew. Although we are handsomer than a wheel.”  
  
Yusuf chuckles. “Very much so.”  
  
“I take my energy from you,” Nicolò continues. His forehead rests against Yusuf’s as he speaks quietly, and Yusuf wraps his arms tightly around Nicolò’s waist, keeping him close. “Loving you is what moves me forward. I need nothing else.”  
  
* * *  
  
Twilight sparkles through the open window. Yusuf gazes upon it, with Nicolò relaxed in his arms. For a long while, they are silent. Comfortable, warm, breathing gently as they nestle together in soft sheets and clean skin. Yusuf thinks perhaps Nicolò has fallen into dreams, and is about to slip there himself, but then lips push into his neck.  
  
“Sleep, habibi,” he whispers.  
  
“How can I?” Nicolò asks, “when the most attractive man in all the world is naked in my bed?”  
  
Yusuf smiles into his hair. Nicolò’s hands roam, suddenly, as if he is unable to keep from touching. He runs his fingers over Yusuf’s arm, his waist, the hair on his chest. “Be still,” Yusuf says, with a laugh as Nicolò finds a ticklish spot. “I am trying to rest.”  
  
“I cannot. We are perpetual motion, remember?”  
  
“Ah, yes, of course.”  
  
“Do you really think we will be together forever? Until the end of the world?”  
  
Yusuf considers the question, because it is an important one. Nicolò does still in his arms, waiting patiently until Yusuf tells him, “of all the things I have ever touched, and held, and gazed upon, there has been nothing like you. There could not be anything like you. I think we will have to be together forever, because I would never go where I could not bring you with me. I would not want to.”  
  
It is something he’s said before and something he will say again, and again and again and again, until every last doubt in the darkest corners of Nicolò’s mind has been cleansed by sunshine.  
  
“What are you thinking?” Yusuf asks quietly. He nudges Nicolò as he does, so that Yusuf can roll onto his side and see Nicolò’s face in the shadows.  
  
“Of you.” Nicolò’s lips curve into a smile and his fingertips brush along Yusuf’s cheek. “Always of you. Of how wonderful it feels to have you in my arms. Of your smile. I have lived hundreds of years, I have stood on every known landmass on this Earth and I have never seen a smile more beautiful than yours. Your body that I ache for, your generous heart that pulled mine from darkness and taught it to love.”  
  
Yusuf’s eyes close, swells of warmth in his chest overwhelming, and Nicolò kisses the tip of his nose.  
  
“I will be glad to see our sisters again in a few months’ time but for right now, I am glad to have you all to myself.”  
  
“I am always yours,” Yusuf promises. “If we are the only two around for miles or if we are in the midst of a throng of thousands.”  
  
“And I am always yours.”  
  
“Do you think we should be married?”  
  
Nicolò is silent for a moment and then giggles. “Who would let us?”   
  
“I am not suggesting we ask. We do not belong to any church or kingdom. What does it matter? I am suggesting we, right this minute, decide that we are married. And then so be it.”  
  
Nicolò’s lips press together and his gaze unfocuses, as if he is considering it. “I never thought I would be married. The laws of chastity were very strict.”  
  
“I think you’ve sufficiently broken those,” Yusuf points out, gesturing unnecessarily down toward their bare bodies underneath the sheet.  
  
“Yes.” Nicolò chuckles warmly. “Alright. I would like you to be my husband.”  
  
“Would you let me paint you, again, tomorrow? To celebrate?”  
  
“Have you even completed the one from yesterday? I do not remember you getting very far before we were … distracted.”  
  
“Ha!” Yusuf dives forward into him, hugging him tightly and nuzzling his nose into Nicolò’s cheek. “With your skin bare before me? Your eyes in the candlelight? How could I not become distracted? It is an impossible task.”  
  
“I suppose it cannot hurt to try again.”  
  
“We will leave, in this place, a room full of half-finished portraits. One day, centuries from now, perhaps men of history will study them and wonder, who was this man? This striking, nameless subject, whose portrait-painter could not seem to complete a single likeness.”  
  
“Whatever tale they weave will not be the truth.”  
  
“And what is the truth? That you distract me on purpose?”  
  
Nicolò nudges Yusuf’s cheek with his nose and then slides their mouths together when Yusuf looks down at him. “The truth is that he was my husband, and the most wonderful lover, and I longed too much for his touch to let him stare at me all afternoon without so much as a kiss.”  
  
“It is lucky, then, that he has a perpetual supply of kisses.” Yusuf looks just for a moment into clear green eyes, and then makes good on his promise.  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note I have taken significant artistic license to imagine that Giovanni d’Antonio was interested in perpetual motion machines. I hope his ghost will forgive me.
> 
> [The Renaissance in Florence ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Florence#Renaissance)  
> [Renaissance Art in Florence](http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/history-of-art/renaissance-in-florence.htm)  
> [Giovanni Angelo d’Antonio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Angelo_d%27Antonio)  
> Perpetual Motion [x](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_motion#History) [x](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_perpetual_motion_machines#History)


	6. Nagasaki, 1573

_“Learning is to a man as the leaves and branches are to a tree.”_  
_Takeda Shingen,_ _mid-16 th century (exact year unknown)_  
  
  
The ship departs from Lisbon at sunrise. In the dawning hours, the docks are a flurry of activity. The loading of barrels, final checking of knots and hinges, the throng of wives and children bidding tearful farewells to their husbands and fathers. Nico does not have anyone to whom he must say goodbye. Everyone he loves in this world is coming with him, as it should be.  
  
Their home for the coming months is a _carrack_ , a massive Portuguese vessel with four masts and five towering sails, painted black with pitch to seal it. Nico has heard they are slow, but large enough for all that it will bring back from Japan. Nico has never seen a ship so large. He thinks it could house an entire town. Today, it is packed to the rafters with goods to trade and provisions for their voyage. When it returns, it will be filled with fine, embroidered silk, and precious metals; copper and silver, smithed by more talented hands and techniques than those that exist in Europe. Nico has seen the finery that results from these trade missions, and he has never been one for shiny things but he cannot deny their beauty.  
  
A small hand grips his shoulder tight and he turns into a familiar excited face and glittering dark eyes. “Ready?” she asks, with a grin. _Qiana_ , they have renamed her, as they have all adopted new names so that they can exist in this time and space just a bit more inconspicuously.  
  
“Is it too late to change my mind?” Nico replies, only partly joking.  
  
He has never been at sea for as long as this voyage will last. They must sail South, around the very tip of the African continent, then Northeast to Goa where they will replenish their supplies, and then carefully through a field of small islands before they reach their final destination. It will take months, and despite a childhood spent by the water, Nico was never much of a sailor. Yusuf – _José_ , now – was always more comfortable at sea, having spent over ten years on it before they met. And Qiana and Andréa are old enough to have done and seen everything, or so it always seems to Nico. A thousand years ago, their older sisters had spent a century on the Eastern island that Nico did not know existed when he was mortal. He is the only one nervous he might spend nearly half of the next year queasy and unable to keep food in his stomach and slowly going mad in small, confined spaces.  
  
“I’m afraid so.” Qiana affectionately ruffles his hair. The breeze changes suddenly and sends her long black locks flying around her head. With a huff she reaches into a concealed pocket for a length of twine and ties her hair back at the nape of her neck. With that sorted, she continues, “do not worry, if you become too much of a nuisance, we shall simply throw you overboard.”  
  
“How kind.” Nico returns her blinding smile and laughs when she does.  
  
Across the deck, Andréa is saying something into José’s ear and he is laughing loudly. The sound is warm and achingly familiar, and it fills Nico with the comforts of home even though they are setting out on their grandest quest yet. As the sails are set and the lines cast, the ship lurches into motion and the crowd left on the docks waves them off, an equal mix of smiles and tears on their faces. Nico and Qiana wave back, even though they are leaving no one behind.  
  
The others join them at the rail. It is not safe, here and now, for any of them to act on their true feelings, but in the din and flurry of motion with sailors hurrying around them, José sneaks a quick kiss to Nico’s shoulder. Nico looks down at the ground and smiles as Qiana squeezes his hand.  
  
“To adventure,” Qiana whispers, excitement bubbling in her voice.  
  
“It is not new to you, as it is to us,” José reminds her.  
  
“Oh, but it will be,” she cries. “Time never stops, little brother. It will look nothing like it did a millennium ago. Even for us, it will be brand new.”  
  
* * *  
  
Nico does not, to his great surprise and even greater pleasure, spend the voyage’s first days being constantly sick over the side of the ship as he had the first time they made passage from France to England. The carrack is so large that it smooths the rough sea, plowing through the waves as if they do not exist at all. The floor beneath them is steady, and Nico could kiss it every morning when he wakes to find it solid and unmoving.  
  
The days are long and the work is hard, with the sun pouring down on them and the salt air collecting in their eyelashes. Their hands grow rough with callouses from pulling on dozens of ropes, and more than once either Nico or José has to step in when one of the men has a dangerous look in his eye around their sisters. Not because they could not defend themselves – Andréa has cut down more men in her long life than these brash sailors could fathom – but since the Captain would not be pleased if the only two women aboard were initiating brawls. It had been work enough to convince anyone to allow them to come along, even once they had both demonstrated they already spoke the language and would therefore be far more useful than José or Nico.  
  
The nights make up for the monotony of the days. When the air around them cools, and the enormous open sky above them fills with stars bright enough to light their way forward, Nico finds some shadowy corner of the lower deck behind a large canon and sits with José, close under the cover of darkness. He leans back against something solid and José sits between his legs and leans into Nico’s chest. His arms slide around José’s waist and his nose finds its favorite spot in José’s curls; shorter now than they have ever been but still plush and wiry and scented like oil and spices. That smell never goes out of him, not when he’s just bathed and not when it has been weeks since they last saw clean water. It is stuck underneath his skin, his _before_ life as embedded in him as are the thin scars on Nico’s back, from his years as a defiant adolescent dropped on the door of a seminary by parents who could not afford to feed him and did not bother to kiss him goodbye.  
  
“The Hunter,” José says softly, pointing to the sky.  
  
Nico raises his gaze and finds the row of three bright dots against the clear black backdrop. “A warrior,” he replies. “Like us.”  
  
“We are not warriors, Nicolò. Not really,” José whispers. His head turns, mouth finding Nico’s bearded jaw and placing a kiss on it. “We are The Lovers.”  
  
Nico smiles at that and covers José’s lips with his own. The gentle movement of the ocean underneath the ship rocks them, a soothing back and forth. José is so warm in his arms.  
  
The click of boots on wooden planks has them momentarily scrambling to put distance between their bodies, but the face that grins down at them through the shadows is Andréa’s. Her green eyes dance and her head shakes fondly as they sigh and settle back into each other.  
  
“Gentlemen,” she greets, exaggerating a polite, deep curtsey.  
  
“Good evening, senhora,” José responds with a casual salute before his head tips back onto Nico’s shoulder. Nico hugs around his middle again as Qiana appears behind Andréa and clasps her hands theatrically over her breast.  
  
“Our little brothers, Andromache. So in love.”  
  
“We are undeniably an unconventional family,” Andréa cracks. She squats down and then lands ungracefully on her backside, reaching a hand up for Qiana who immediately curls up in her arms as José is in Nico’s.  
  
José points out a few more constellations and Andréa relays ancient names for them from different times and places. No one bothers them – Nico suspects the rest of the crew are a little bit scared of them, so most of the time no one bothers them after a few incidents in the early going – so they talk and laugh quietly until José has fallen asleep with his head on Nico’s shoulder and their fingers threaded comfortably together. Qiana and Andréa both smile at him when they notice, fondness sparkling in their eyes.  
  
Nico is overwhelmed just for a moment, with the love of his life in his arms and his family surrounding him.  
  
* * *  
  
Nico has spent four centuries observing that which is unlike anything he has seen before, thinking perhaps this new wonder is the most fantastical thing he will ever encounter and then being proven wrong over and over, but the port of Nagasaki might be the most unlike anything he’s encountered. It is a tangled mess of ships, large ones like theirs and smaller caravels, and ships of foreign construction that Nico has no name for. The Japanese vessels are differently shaped and strangely adorned. He cannot seem to take his eyes off them. It seems like utter chaos; dozens of ships weaving around each other in the cramped space of the sunny harbor, but none crash, and so there must be order to it that Nico just cannot see. He quite likes the symbolism in that.  
  
Their vessel docks near the end of the inlet and the moment the ropes are thrown to waiting hands on the quay, the crew bursts into action and the four of them are able to slip away without being noticed. Their plan was never, as they had told the Captain, to facilitate trade and the further spread of Christianity to these people. Horrified is not a large enough word to describe how Nico had felt when he’d learned leaders across two oceans were being convinced to abandon their own gods and embrace the one that he once proselytized.  
  
At the very least, it seems to be done peacefully these days and not with the sword as he himself had been so guilty of – guilt that he carries with him with every step he takes as time marches forward – but he still does not like it.  
  
José’s eyes are similarly wide as they step on solid ground for the first time in close to half a year. The bustle reminds Nico of the markets in Morocco, and yet thrillingly unfamiliar all at once. Their new surroundings are bursting with life, with sounds and smells, with colors he’s never seen before. The buildings are delightfully odd. Towers piled high, painted in rich tones, with tall, sloped roofs, curved upwards at the eaves and ornately decorated. The windows are small and square. The gardens are lush and filled with leaves and flowers Nico could not have imagined in the most vivid of daydreams.  
  
Men and women pay them no mind as they pass, in their straw sandals and black hair and colorful robes. The garments are dyed silk, and are embroidered with the most beautiful, delicate patterns, of leaves and birds and whimsical shapes. Nico is awed by it. His senses are overwhelmed and can only follow numbly along behind the others, as Qiana spots a cart selling a fragrant dish that reminds her of her childhood across the channel and rushes to it, squealing happily.  
  
* * *  
  
A small dwelling near the edge of the square becomes their home.  
  
José wastes no time in finding a group of painters to befriend, learning the style they call _Kanō_ and thrilling the others with his creations of beautiful Cypress trees and mythical dragons painted onto screens. He masters it quickly, talented as he is, and decorates their new home. Andréa becomes enraptured with the food, with sampling everything unknown she can get her hands on and begging local elders to teach her to cook it. She regales them with stories of the last time they were on this island, and with how much everything around them has changed. Qiana transforms back into Quynh and becomes their leader, in a land that is not as foreign to her as it is to them. She blends in with the crowds in a way the others cannot and speaks rapidly with the women in the market.  
  
Nico soaks it all in like a dry cloth drawing in moisture. Everything around him feels novel and brilliant and captivating. His family is happy, free of struggle or violence. In their cottage in the evenings, they cook for each other and tease and laugh loudly.  
  
Quynh plays haunting music for them on a lute while Andréa gazes at her with stars in her eyes and pink on her cheeks. José takes Nico’s hand and guides him into his lap, and Nico sits with him and bathes, like a pool of still water surrounding him, in the endless joy of it all.  
  
“Isn’t she wonderful?” Andréa asks.  
  
It is not really a question, but of course José immediately answers. “The most wonderful.”  
  
Quynh giggles and rolls her eyes and gripes at them to stop, but Nico sees the way she smiles. He tips his head to rest against José’s, warm and content.  
  
* * *  
  
Nico takes to wandering the city in the mornings, sometimes with Quynh at his side and other times in quiet solitude. Nico thinks he could stay here forever; lost in the excitement of a bustling port town, learning the language and its strange and fascinating characters, conversing with interesting strangers, finding work where they can with the Portuguese traders. The sun is warm, his surroundings are beautiful, and he finds peace in strolling idly with no particular destination in mind and no need to hurry back.  
  
On a cloudy Tuesday he finds a temple at the top of a low hill. Its walls are painted dark red, with a curved roof and ornate carvings like so many buildings in this city. He climbs a long staircase, his skin flushed by the time he reaches the top, and silently absorbs his surroundings. Removed from the bustle of the streets below, a strange sense of calm overtakes him. As he passes statues and intricate paintings on the canvas walls, like the ones José is learning to create, Nico feels the history of it. It is almost as if he can see the shadows of the thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of souls that have worshiped in this place over the centuries. He can feel them, taking brief moments from their hectic lives to sit in this garden and simply breathe.  
  
When Nico used to pray – when he spent many hours of each day settled on his knees and letting the spirit of the Lord wash over him – he had always felt heavy and grounded, as if he were a small ship on a rough sea but in those moments he was anchored safely in a sheltered harbor. Long ago, he tossed all that away. It had led to things he regrets, even now, with a visceral ache and with bile rising in his throat before he swallows it down. He would be lying, though, if he did not admit to missing certain aspects of it.  
  
“Are you lost?”  
  
Nico looks up. A round, old man is standing across the garden, frowning at him. Nico is not nearly fluent in their language, yet, but he has learned enough in the weeks since they arrived to converse as long as his partner in conversation is kind enough to speak slowly.  
  
“No,” he answers. “Am I trespassing?”  
  
The man still frowns, but his head shakes back and forth. His long, thin beard sways in front of his chest. “You are a curious sight, is all. Traders never enter our temples. Too preoccupied with building their own.”  
  
Nico nods and feels his stomach swoop in regret. It is not his doing, that the Jesuit priests are spreading their ideas to these ancient people, but he still feels he bears responsibility for it. “I wish they wouldn’t.”  
  
After eyeing him warily for a moment, as if he is trying to work out whether Nico is being honest, the man agrees. “As do I.”  
  
For just another moment they stare at each other. Then the man turns and, slowly building a bridge between worlds, makes his way along a tiled corridor and out of sight around a corner.  
  
Nico exhales. Since he was not told to leave, he sits, on the ground amongst strange and foreign foliage, and closes his eyes. His legs cross underneath him and his hands rest comfortably on his knees. He is not sure, later, how long he remains there. It feels like a long time.  
  
He does not tell anyone about his discovery, later when they are all in their cottage happily consuming Andréa’s latest culinary creation. It has been centuries since Nico has kept a secret. He finds he enjoys the feeling of having something for himself.  
  
A week later he returns, drawn back to the temple as a river is drawn to the ocean; his feet carrying him there seemingly without waiting for permission from his mind. This time there are others – a young woman and two small, loud children. Nico waits patiently and they do not stay for long, soon allowing him the privacy to settle on the ground as he had before and simply breathe the humid air. The old man passes in front of him and unspoken recognition floats between their gazes as they meet, but they do not speak.  
  
Three more times he visits the temple before the man addresses him again.  
  
“May I ask?” he begins, standing over Nico on the ground with his head tilted curiously to one side.  
  
“I find it peaceful,” Nico says, truthfully.  
  
The man shakes his head. “Your men, they are erecting churches in the square. Why not pray there?”  
  
“They are not my men. And I am not praying.”  
  
Wrinkles deepen on his face as the man frowns. He clicks his tongue impatiently and shakes his head, turning and gesturing for Nico to follow him, so Nico does. With his slow, uneven gait, the man leads him from the garden and down a long hallway to a small room near the back of the building. It is not as elegantly decorated as the public spaces in the temple; its walls are simple wood and screens and its stone floor groans under their footsteps.  
  
As Nico looks around, the man hobbles toward a small hearth in the corner of the room, using his walking stick to lift the wooden handle of an iron teapot and settling it on a hook over the open flames. Without looking back at Nico, he gestures with his free hand toward a low table against the opposite wall. Nico follows the direction, sitting on the floor with his legs folded underneath him and his hands resting on the tabletop. He waits, patient and silent, for the water to heat. The man is awkward in his movements and Nico wants to leap up and offer to help with the teacups as he brings them over, but he thinks it might be impolite, so he remains where he is.  
  
Nico is familiar with this tea, after weeks on the island. It tastes nothing like the tea he has been used to, but he enjoys its leafy, smokey flavor. He gratefully accepts the cup offered to him and brings it to his mouth, inhaling the fragrant steam that curls off the surface of the beverage.  
  
“Explain,” the man says, simply, as he settles on the floor opposite Nico.  
  
“My name is Nicolò,” he says, as a place to start.  
  
“Yukito,” the old man answers, bowing his head politely.  
  
Nico returns the action. “I was a priest, a very long time ago. I do not believe, anymore, in what I was taught.”  
  
The man considers him thoughtfully, with eyes that remind Nico of Yusuf’s – warm and gentle and full of life but exacting. They see too much.  
  
“Tell me about your God,” Nico requests.  
  
“Bah.” The man waves a hand impatiently. “I do not have a God.”  
  
Nico frowns. “Then what was this temple built for?”  
  
Yukito spends another long, unnerving moment regarding Nico. When he speaks, it is with a tone of suspicion. “Tell me why you no longer believe. And I will know if you are lying to me.”  
  
Nico sips his tea. As he sets the cup back onto the table, he answers, “because I have seen too many atrocities committed in Christ’s name. Because the world is full of suffering and I cannot imagine a loving God allowing it.”  
  
Yukito’s eyes narrow. “And?” he prompts.  
  
Nico presses his lips together, unable to contain the smile that tugs at the corners of his lips. The man was right, that he would know if the entire truth was being withheld. Usually, he does not divulge this aspect of his life to strangers. None of them do, it has so rarely been worth the risk. But before him sits an elderly man who could cause Nico no harm other than the weight of his scorn, so Nico takes the chance.  
  
“And because I am in love with a man, which my church says is sinful. But he’s kind, and brave, and wonderful, and loving him does not feel wrong.”  
  
He is unsure of what to expect in response, but Yukito only continues to gaze thoughtfully at him. He sips at his own tea, and after a moment he nods. “What is his name?”  
  
“Yusuf.”  
  
“He loves you in return?”  
  
“He does.”  
  
“You are lucky.”  
  
“Very.”  
  
Yukito sets his cup down and holds his hands out in front of him, gesturing in the air around them. “To be one with our surroundings. To feel the energy of the earth beneath your feet, the sun above your head, the breeze when it wraps around you. To know yourself, to understand why you have suffered and to rise above that suffering, to achieve an enlightened state in your mind and in your heart. That is the purpose of this temple.”  
  
“No gods, no saints?” Nico asks. It confuses him, the idea of religion without figureheads.  
  
“There are spiritual leaders,” Yukito answers, “but their teachings guide us on our journeys. We do not worship them as you worship your saints.”  
  
“But that is for this life, yes? What happens in the next?”  
  
“We are reborn. Sometimes into a new human body, sometimes not. If you have been unkind in your life, you might not return as something you would want to be.”  
  
He thinks of his own situation, of how many times life has slipped away from him only to be breathed back into this same body. Nico has more questions, hundreds of them burning at the back of his throat, but Yukito stands with some effort and returns to the hearth for more tea. Nico stares into the leaves settled at the bottom of his cup as the hunger for more information spins like a windstorm in his mind.  
  
It is well past dark by the time he leaves the temple, thanking Yukito for indulging his curiosity and promising to return in a few days’ time. He is not entirely sure that Yukito wants him to return and was not simply too polite to say so, but the man did seem to enjoy their discussion once he had determined the purity of Nico’s intentions.  
  
His mind still races as he walks home in the glow of a full moon, feeling the ground underneath each step in a way he never has before. The evening air on his cheeks seems to speak to him, whispering invisible messages on fragrant breezes that Nico cannot yet understand but would like to, some day. He’d learned that sitting in the garden with his eyes closed, breathing and letting his mind clear, is called _meditation_ – that he had been practicing their ways already without realizing. He’d learned that everything is connected, that energy exists all around them, that the beating heart of a man is no more or less important than that of a snail or a sheep. He wonders, heart racing at the thought of it, if he was drawn to Yusuf in Jerusalem by that energy. If it was not _God’s plan_ after all, but something far stronger and more unknowable.  
  
When he rounds the corner of the dirt road that leads to their cottage, he sees his husband out on the front step, head moving back and forth as he searches in the darkness for something down either end of the road, and Nico’s heart sinks.  
  
He hurries, calling out and waving, and watches with guilt licking at his insides as José’s posture slumps in relief. “Are you alright?” he asks breathlessly, as Nico trots the last few steps between them and stumbles into open arms.  
  
“Yes, I’m so sorry. I lost track of time.”  
  
“Where on Earth were you? I was worried.”  
  
Nico cups his cheeks in his hands and kisses him. The tips of his thumbs find the dimples carved into José’s cheeks. He so rarely gets a glimpse at them. José is bearded far more often than he is not, and Nico treasures the sweet divots on either side of his smile when he has a chance to admire them. “Let’s go inside, I will tell you all about it.”  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [History of Nagasaki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nagasaki#Nagasaki_as_a_Jesuit_port_of_call)  
> [Port of Nagasaki](http://www.worldportsource.com/ports/review/JPN_Port_of_Nagasaki_1412.php)  
> Nanban Trade [x](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanban_trade) [X](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan_voyage)  
> [Early Sailing Ships](https://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~vaucher/History/Ships_Discovery/#:~:text=Top%20speed%20for%20a%20caravel,100%20miles%20in%20a%20day.&text=In%201492%20Colombus's%20used%202,as%20his%20flagship%20%5BMore%5D)  
> [Kano School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan%C5%8D_school#:~:text=The%20Kan%C5%8D%20school%20\(%E7%8B%A9%E9%87%8E%E6%B4%BE,divided%20into%20many%20different%20branches)


	7. Tunis, 1613

_“Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage.”_  
 _Richard Lovelace, 1642_  
  
  
They lose her in the middle of August.  
  
Twelve are accused. Joseph could not and would not presume he knows all that exists in this world and in whatever lies beyond it. Years ago he’d read their friend William’s latest work, the tragedy of a fictional Danish prince, and one line of dialogue has stuck with him: _There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy_. Joseph has lived long centuries, has seen and done more than most souls, living or dead, can say. But he has not seen _all_. He does not know everything.  
  
Innocent people have had their lives snuffed out like a candle flame, and whether they died by witchcraft or by some natural but yet-unknown maladies, he could not say for sure. The problem lies in that neither can anyone else. The trials were laughable – or, they would have been, if their outcome were not so dire. He doubts murder-by-magic could ever possibly be proven, but the methods used in a grand performance of doing so were utterly ridiculous, entirely for show and lacking completely in science or logic or any tangible evidence. Since it was all for show, ten of the twelve are condemned for possibly imaginary crimes, and Joseph cannot be sure of all that exists in heaven and Earth but he knows it is not right for a person to be hanged over something so blatantly unproven.  
  
And then Andréa and Qiana are suspected, and captured, and hanged, and beaten, and crushed under large slabs of stone. Joseph and Nicholas beg and plead and negotiate and fight as bitterly as they can but fail to free their sisters before the mob is dragging one out and locking her in an iron coffin and taking her away from them.  
  
Twelve are accused, ten are dead, one is at the bottom of the ocean. Trapped, but unable to die. Drowning and waking, drowning and waking, an endless cycle of pain and crushing weight and collapsing lungs and the kind of terror Joseph could not imagine in his wildest and most heart-stopping nightmares.  
  
They lose her in August. _Quynh_. For the safety’s sake they have endeavored to imbed their new names into themselves and each other but now that she is lost, Joseph cannot bear to think of her as anything but their Quynh.  
  
The personification of sunshine in their little family. The woman with the most brilliant smile, with all the kindness in the world in her heart. Who loved children, who was utterly fearless in battle, who thought trees were magical and always gazed in wonder when they stood at the base of one whose top they could not even see because it cascaded too far up into the sky. She always smiled brighter than a full moon on a clear night when Yusuf showed her a new sketch he’d done and praised him excitedly as if it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. Nicolò becomes trapped in his head sometimes, so pensive and serious, and Quynh could always make him laugh and bring him back. She held his oft-fragile heart so gently in her hands, and Yusuf has loved her for that. Their sister, their friend.  
  
They lose Andréa with her. Not physically. She is still beside them, she still lives and breathes, she still eats and walks and broods, but she is lost to them. Her heart has gone overboard with Quynh and resides now on the seafloor, as Joseph knows his would if it were Nicholas in the iron cage.  
  
For eleven months they tear up and down the English countryside. They capture the ship’s captain and demand information of him, and he weeps and blubbers and prays loudly for God to strike down the witch and her demons but he gives them nothing. Andréa becomes frustrated and drives a dagger into his throat, grinning wickedly as he chokes and life bleeds away from him. Nicholas yells for her not to, not because he cares for the man but because what he knows of Quynh’s whereabouts dies with him, but it is too late and the man is gone.  
  
He does convince her not to kill anyone else. _They could change their minds_ , Nicholas reasons, _perhaps they will refuse to help us today but we could come back months from now and they will tell us where they dropped her_.  
  
It proves fruitless, and endlessly frustrating. Every sailor they come across recognizes Andréa and nearly loses his lunch in fear of her, and yet still gives them nothing. One boy, far too young to have been involved in something so horrible in the first place, does try. He does not have knowledge of directions or maps but he describes what he saw on the ship and how long they travelled before they threw her overboard. It does not help. She could still be anywhere, and perhaps is not staying in one place. If the coffin is moving along the ocean floor with the currents, even discovering the exact spot where they tossed her would not help them.  
  
Andréa stops eating. She takes to wading far out into the water and diving down, drowning herself over and over as she struggles to reach the bottom, searching for Quynh inch by inch as the salt burns her eyes and the water fills her lungs. Joseph and Nicholas watch helplessly as she changes before their eyes. As she slices off her long hair with a sword, as her cheeks hollow and her skin greys, until her inner light has dimmed so drastically that Joseph can barely remember it being there at all. He does not recognize the woman he once knew so well. The very soul inside her has been tarnished, trapped forever under the sea with Quynh.  
  
At the end of July the following year, they revisit the priest who had held a wooden cross aloft as Quynh was chained inside the coffin. Tears pour down his cheeks and he drops to his knees the moment he sees them approaching, clasping his hands and harshly muttering under his breath. Next to Joseph, Nicholas tenses. It hurts him, always, when holy men are involved.  
  
Andréa promises to haunt the man for the rest of eternity if he does not tell them where they can find Quynh, and as he has before, the man pleads for them to leave him and swears to them that he does not know where she is. That all he knows is they sailed for hours toward the horizon, and then turned around and sailed back. There are no markers on the open water with which to keep bearings, so he does not know which way they went or how far.  
  
With a quick flick of her labrys, Andréa removes his head from his body. It rolls grotesquely along the ground as his corpse falls into the dirt.  
  
Nicholas covers his mouth and turns away, and too many emotions to list roll painfully in Joseph’s gut. Anger, grief, repulsion, hopelessness. It all cascades within him until it feels like far too much to bear, until it feels like he’s going to lose consciousness. He might even welcome it, if he thought he might stay that way. But he would not, he would only wake immediately back into this Hell.  
  
Later, seated next to Joseph in front of a glowing fire that lights the darkness around them, Nicholas quietly asks, “how long are we going to do this?”  
  
Joseph wets his lips and closes his eyes for a spell. Andréa is standing by the river’s edge, far enough away from them that if they speak softly she will not overhear. She’s rinsing blood from a length of cloth she ties around her shoulders. It’s not her blood.  
  
“I wish I knew,” he answers, regretting it even though he knows Nicholas was not really expecting him to have an answer.  
  
The day before, they had spent hours bobbing in a small, stolen ketch, while underneath the surface of the water Andréa died over and over again in her futile search. Joseph was against her ever trying that in the first place, the chances of her happening upon Quynh’s oceanic grave in the vastness of the North Atlantic are incalculably small. He thinks, privately, that Andréa knows that. He thinks the purpose of it is self-flagellation – condemning herself to drowning endlessly as Quynh does.  
  
“We’re losing her, as well,” Nicholas says, looking at Andréa’s shadowy outline by the water. “I could not bear to lose you, next.”  
  
With the sting of tears prickling behind his eyes, Joseph shifts closer to him. Nicholas’s light eyes shine in the firelight, and Joseph takes his hand and brings the back of his palm up to kiss it. “You could never,” he whispers, but they both know it is not true. They know too well, now, of how easy it could be.  
  
“I love you,” Nicholas whispers back. Joseph returns it and places a kiss on Nicholas’s lips, warming inside when Nicholas’s mouth moves against his. It is not loving so much as it is desperate and heartbroken.  
  
Andréa’s heavy footfalls approach and briskly she says, “we will take a boat, again, tomorrow. Further North, perhaps.”  
  
Nicholas’s eyes do not leave his, pressed close to each other by the fire. Above them, Andréa scoffs in annoyance. The sight of them together no longer makes her smile fondly and proudly as it once did, now it seems to offend her. Her eyes roll when Joseph brushes hair back off Nicholas’s forehead, she interrupts them when they are murmuring to each other early in the morning while still in their bedrolls, her fists clench when they kiss where she can see. If possible, Joseph thinks that is what hurts most of all. They haven’t only lost Quynh, like Nicholas said. They have lost their family.  
  
Along the line of their gaze, Joseph asks the question with his eyes and Nicholas nods minutely.  
  
“ _What_?” Andréa asks loudly, obnoxious and irritated in their ability to speak without words.  
  
“I think we should take a break,” Joseph says. He does not want to look away from Nicholas, enchanted still by his eyes as he has been since the day his hatred of the pale invader melted away, but he does, and looks up at Andréa, still hovering over them with her hand on her hip.  
  
She does not answer. Her eyes narrow and her stare feels like it digs into him like a chisel. After a moment she moves, wringing the cloth out again so a bit more moisture drips from it and going to hang it over the low branch of a nearby tree to dry.  
  
“Andréa,” he says, louder since she walked away from them.  
  
“I will grant you the favor of pretending I did not hear you,” her voice says flatly, back still turned.  
  
Nicholas sniffs and his head falls, hanging down so that his hair covers his eyes.  
  
Joseph takes his cheeks in his hands and presses a long kiss to his forehead. Then he stands and readies himself for the fight. “We do not want to give up on her, to stop searching for her. But it has been a year. A year of doing nothing else, a year of watching you drown yourself and dreading the day you do not resurface, and we lose you, too.”  
  
She turns with reddened cheeks and widened eyes. “Was that especially difficult for you? Sitting comfortably in the sunshine with the man you love, while I died?”  
  
“Yes!” he cries, upset that she could think, even in anger, that it wasn’t. “We cannot go on like this and neither can you. We need to exist for two or three weeks in a place where we do not have to think about her every minute of the day.”  
  
“Why do you deserve such luxury, when she cannot think of anything else?”  
  
“She is not going anywhere,” Nicholas says softly. He is still on the ground, legs tucked against his chest and arms wrapped around them. He does not look up. It is unlike him to be so meek. He is thoughtful, certainly, but never timid. “If we allowed ourselves a small reprieve, she would still be there when we return.”  
  
Andréa laughs, but it is not the joyous expression of mirth that Joseph has come to know. It could be the most unkind sound he has ever heard. “And when we find her, how are you going to explain to her that she was down there, dying every single minute, for weeks longer than she needed to be because you two wanted a holiday?”  
  
“We are not going to find her at all if we are so ruined by her loss that we cannot see two feet in front of our faces. And in the meanwhile, others are suffering and dying everywhere, and we aren’t helping them either.” Joseph thinks of the sieges in Moscow last autumn, of the massacre in Vologda, of the resulting famine. They could have helped and instead they had wholly ignored it because Andréa refused to leave the English coast.  
  
“Is this how long you would last if it were Nicolò?” Andréa asks coldly, her pale eyes trained on Joseph. “Less than one full year before your surrender?”  
  
“I would _never_ give up,” Joseph chews out from between violently clenched molars. The suggestion that he might, even if it comes only from frustration, is more offensive than he can stomach. The muscles in his face ache from glaring at her. “Never. And I will never give up on Quynh. We are not giving up, we are asking you to allow us to breathe for a moment. Two weeks. Let me take Nico to the South for two weeks and then we will be right back here with you, and we will search for her until we find her or until our hearts stop and do not start again.”  
  
“Will you?” she challenges, exacting. “Or will it be even less time before you need another break, and then another? How long before you abandon her altogether?”  
  
“We would not – ” Joseph begins angrily, but Nicholas’s quiet voice interrupts.  
  
“Quynh was …” Nicholas closes his eyes for a moment at the slip. He finally stands, squarely facing their sister, and corrects, “Quynh _is_ the most beautiful force of life I have ever known. She would not want us to stop living, Andréa. She knows we’re coming for her. We are her family and we never leave each other behind. In five hundred years we have never left each other behind. But she would hate to come back to a version of us that are so broken she could not recognize who we are anymore. I know you will not be pleased to hear that, but I also know you know it to be true.”  
  
When Andréa responds, it’s not what Joseph is expecting to hear. Her voice is low and level, but not calm. Cold fury drips off every word, as she icily commands, “do not call me that.”  
  
Nicholas blinks twice and frowns.  
  
“ _Andréa_ ,” she spits. “That is not my name. I was worshiped as a _goddess_ , two thousand years before you were even born, and that is not the name they spoke as they laid tribute on my altar. That is not the name Quynh screamed as they dragged her away from me. My name is Andromache.”  
  
“We know who you are,” Joseph begins, but her fire rounds back onto him, her eyes wide and wild and frightening.  
  
“My name used to strike fear into the hearts of men across the known world,” she says. She does not need to shout for her ire to be clear. Every clipped word is quiet and controlled, but palpably rageful. “My name carries history and humanity in every syllable. No longer will I reduce it to something new so that I may fit into this century, when this century has taken _everything_ from me. The two of you are small, and young. You may think your love is immemorial, but I have loved Quynh more profoundly than your infant hearts could ever understand.”  
  
“Andromache.”  
  
“And if you think that abandoning her and spending two weeks lounging on a beach somewhere because this is _difficult_ is something that I would be able to do without my bones turning to dust beneath my flesh, then you have never known me at all.”  
  
Joseph looks to Nicholas, at a loss for words, but is not given the chance to come up with a response before Andréa is waving her hand impatiently in front of her face.  
  
“Go, then. Take your Nico to the Middle Sea. Lay in the sun, laugh, drink, make love. I will not stand in your way. But if you do, do not come back.”  
  
Without another word she turns and storms away, towards the wooded glen in the darkness. Joseph follows her but only makes it two steps.  
  
“Stop,” Nicholas says softly, reaching for Joseph’s arm and holding it. Joseph looks back at him, with such utter sadness glittering in his endlessly expressive eyes. “She does not mean it.”  
  
Joseph knows that as well as Nicholas does. He breathes, slow and careful, and then he moves in closer and tips his head down to push against Nicholas’s.  
  
Nicholas closes his eyes and slides both hands over Joseph’s shoulders, squeezing the muscles underneath his palms. With their foreheads still resting together, Joseph wraps his arms around Nicholas’s waist and tugs him in just an inch closer.  
  
_I love you_ , Joseph says, without making a sound.  
  
_I know_ , Nicholas answers.  
  
* * *  
  
They do not travel, as Joseph had said they would, to the South of England. Instead they take Andréa’s suggestion, insincere as it was, and begin the long trek to the sea upon which they were both raised. They will be gone far longer than two weeks, and in his initial anger Joseph has half a mind to be gone a year and leave Andréa thinking they really are not coming back. That anger melts, somewhere off the coast of Spain, as warm air finds them and Nicholas slips his hand into Joseph’s on the deck of the merchant schooner.  
  
The land of Joseph’s birth is under Ottoman control. The _Eyalet of Tunis_ , it is now called, and it looks nothing like it did when he was small. It is not really possible to find where his house would have stood, because everything has changed. Ancient roads have moved, buildings have been demolished and new ones erected in their place. Even the sun overhead seems different. Joseph remembers being warm but comfortable when he was growing up, now the sun beats down on them relentlessly as if it’s trying to burn them alive.  
  
They become Yusuf and Nicolò again. They shed their Northern fashions and dress themselves in trousers and mintans with a sarık on each of their heads to cover their hair. For as grey and dreary as England often is, Tunis is bursting with color. Bright glass glitters from mosques, sparkling when it catches the sun and sending its rich hues around like tiny explosions. The markets are lively and bustling, women in beautifully ornate costumes and stalls selling all manner of fruit and nuts and dishes. Even the sea is not the same. The coast they scoured for their sister was black and cold and unforgiving, with waves that crashed angrily into the stony shore. The Middle Sea is a brilliant turquoise, clear and glistening in the golden glow of the daylight.  
  
It has been ages since Yusuf’s had access to any good drawing paper or pencils, and Nicolò instantly points to a woman selling supplies and insists Yusuf purchase some even as he worries they should save their coin for food.  
  
“We can easily earn more,” Nicolò says to him, his smile as dazzling as the sunshine around them. “It has been so long since you’ve drawn me, I can barely remember what I look like.”  
  
Yusuf doubts that’s the truth but he purchases what he needs anyway, endeavouring to make Nicolò pose for him so often he grows tired of it and begs Yusuf to leave him alone. Memories of Florence dance in his imagination, and of other moments where time has seemed to slow, rescuing them from the relentless motion of it so that they may, if only for a spell, enjoy nothing but each other. Violence has been a constant but it has not been their only constant. Nicolò’s warmth has always been there, and Yusuf shudders to think how close he had come to losing it.  
  
He purchases some coffee and kebabs as well and sits with Nicolò near the water to eat them. It was not only the weather and scenery that was drab in England, the food was so tasteless that sometimes Yusuf wondered if he had been stuck with some sort of horrible malady that made his tongue incapable of registering flavors. The paprika and cinnamon explode onto his tongue and Yusuf groans in appreciation, savoring the tender, juicy morsels of meat. Next to him, Nicolò laughs, and Yusuf realizes with a start that it’s the first time he has heard the sound since the previous summer. He hadn’t noticed. He should have noticed. He should have seen the way Nicolò cheeks were hollowing along with Andréa’s and the shine was leaving his eyes too, but he’d been so consumed by his own grief and with worry for Andréa that he’d been neglectful.  
  
“Handsome,” he tells Nicolò, smiling at him when Nicolò tilts his head in question and reaching out to brush fingertips along his jaw. “You said you do not remember what you look like.”  
  
“Ah.” Nicolò smiles back, edges of his eyes creasing beautifully as he does. “Is that so?”  
  
“Your eyes are enchanting, your smile more beautiful than a sunset. Your nose is regal.”  
  
Nicolò snorts. “Is that a flowery way of saying _big_?”  
  
Yusuf sets the bare wooden skewer down on his other side and, since there is no one around, he moves in closer and lifts his arm around Nicolò’s shoulders. Nicolò settles against him, and Yusuf dips down to kiss the tip of the feature currently in question. “I adore your nose,” he murmurs.  
  
Nicolò hums softly and angles his face up for a proper kiss. “I adore you,” he whispers into it.  
  
* * *  
  
Yusuf emerges from the bath on their third night to find Nicolò draped decadently on the bed, against the orange silk pillows. He blinks slowly up at Yusuf, one corner of his lips curving into a small smile as he holds his hand out, reaching for him. His pale skin glints in the lamplight, soft and inviting, half-interested cock resting against the cradle of his hip. Yusuf’s heart nearly stops, unable to take Nicolò’s hand for a moment as he just stares, entranced by his beauty.

  
  
Centuries ago, when their love was new, Nicolò would have been shy. He would have hidden himself, embarrassed by his body, worried it would not be enough to hold Yusuf’s attention and so sure that he did not deserve to have it in the first place. It still puts an ache in Yusuf’s chest to remember, to think of the beautiful man before him so tortured and darkened by the men who spoke for his God. So convinced he was unworthy of anything but violence and fear and shame, so afraid to let himself experience pleasure.  
  
Yusuf goes to him, nearly tripping over his own feet as he lets his towel fall to the floor and crawls over Nicolò. He kisses Nicolò’s sensitive thighs, sliding his mouth and the scrape of his short beard over the skin until it turns pink and then carrying onto his hips, the softness of his quivering stomach, the lovely brown of his nipples.  
  
“Yusuf,” Nicolò whispers, fingers sliding into his curls and tugging gently, bringing Yusuf’s face up so he can kiss him with their tongues swirling languidly together in the middle of it.  
  
“Hello, my heart,” Yusuf whispers back, and then repeats the endearment back in six other languages, punctured with kisses all over Nicolò’s face.  
  
“I have so missed you,” Nicolò breathes.  
  
It has been such an age since they’ve had _time_.  
  
They had been with Andréa for a year, wrapped so tightly in their grief and in hers, in their anger, in their heartache, in their desperation. There had been stolen kisses and frantic hands, brief moments to duck behind a tree or a wall and satisfy each other in ways that left them wholly _un_ satisfied but had to be good enough because there was not space for more. Yusuf had yearned for him, sometimes, and then other times weeks would pass and he would not even think of it once, too overtaken by sorrow.  
  
He lowers himself, hips settling against Nicolò’s so his cock rests in the crease of Nicolò’s hip alongside his own. It is heated and familiar, and Yusuf finds it setting off sparks along his spine, this small amount of touch and the promise of more. Hours stretched out before them, time to kiss Nicolò until their lips are swollen, time to slide his tongue over every delicious inch of him, time to find all his sensitive spots that Yusuf has become unacquainted with but surely still remembers. Time to take him apart into pieces and then stitch him back together with his hands and his mouth and his cock.  
  
“I have ached for you,” Yusuf replies, heartfelt into a slow, messy kiss.  
  
Nicolò’s left hand travels from Yusuf’s hair, fingers trailing down his back and leaving shivers in their wake. He presses his palm into the small of Yusuf’s back, pushing down, urging him to rolls his hips and gasping when he does. “An entire year since you’ve been inside me,” he says on a trembling exhale.  
  
Yusuf slides his nose along Nicolò’s smooth cheek, shaved only this afternoon, with their first access in a long while to a mirror and clean water. “And you in me,” he murmurs, kissing the skin under his lips and undulating his hips. Their cocks rub together, trapped between their bellies. A few more hurried thrusts and Yusuf would be finished before their evening has even begun so he slows himself.  
  
“I have missed that, too,” Nicolò says, “but tonight, may I have you? I need …”  
  
“Yes,” Yusuf answers immediately, before Nicolò can finish his sentence. “Anything you want, name it and it’s yours. What do you need, Nicolò?”  
  
“To feel whole again,” Nicolò admits in a small voice, and Yusuf’s next breath catches in his throat. “To feel that I still belong to you.”  
  
“We belong to each other.” Yusuf looks down at him, blinking against the sting in his eyes when he finds tears in Nicolò’s. They kiss again, even slower than before. “That does not change because something horrible has happened, it does not change because we’ve been unable to be together like this. You are always mine, and I am always yours.”  
  
“Always,” Nicolò returns in a whisper and it sounds, to Yusuf’s ears anyway, less like a promise to Yusuf and more like self-reassurance.  
  
Yusuf would swear he can feel his heart breaking in his chest, cracks slowly opening inside him, the desire to fold Nicolò’s fragments back together so strong it could carry him away like a swift current. He grounds himself instead, anchors himself necessarily in Nicolò’s kiss and the feel of his fingernails dragging gently up Yusuf’s back. Their lips slide together, tongues tangling, the sweet flavor of Nicolò’s mouth bursting on Yusuf’s tongue.  
  
Nicolò breaks the embrace first, whispering another soft, “please …” and Yusuf’s heart breaks all over again, desperately sad that Nicolò thinks he has to beg, thinks that Yusuf would not happily saw off his own arm if it meant seeing Nicolò happy even for one minute.  
  
“It has never been a sacrifice,” Yusuf murmurs to him, moving slowly down his body and pressing wet kisses to Nicolò’s neck and chest, “to give you want you need. It has been the honor of my long life.”  
  
“It has never been, would never be fancy things or gold or luxuries. It has always simply been you.” Nicolò gasps quietly as Yusuf seals his lips on a spot above Nicolò’s hipbone and sucks blood to the surface of his skin, only to watch the bruise disappear before his eyes. He repeats it, four more times, mesmerized by the purple that blooms over Nicolò’s pale flesh and the speed with which it fades back into porcelain.  
  
Beneath his right shoulder, Nicolò’s cock is warm and flushed fully to hardness, dampening at the tip. Yusuf purposely lowers himself into it so it brushes along his skin, before he shifts just a bit lower so he can make it the sole target of his focus.  
  
“Hello, there,” he says softly as he kisses it, lips sliding along the velvet-soft underside. “I have missed you, as well. Have you been alright since we’ve been apart?”  
  
Nicolò exhales slowly and then he laughs, softly and through his nose but it is the most beautiful sound Yusuf has heard in longer than he knows. It feels like a brilliant rainbow after a year of torrential downpour.  
  
Nicolò’s fingers comb gently through Yusuf’s curls. “It has missed you, too. Desperately.”  
  
Yusuf lays his head on Nicolò’s hip, reaching up to lovingly brush his thumb over Nicolò’s cock. It twitches delightfully at his touch, the dark pink flush of it so pretty that Yusuf wishes he could make Nicolò wait just a little longer so that he could leap up and paint him. He wouldn’t, not now, but perhaps tomorrow when their desperation for each other has cooled some.  
  
“Difficult in sadness,” he tells Nicolò’s cock regretfully, “for us to find time for each other.”  
  
“Come up here and kiss me.”  
  
“Shush,” Yusuf admonishes. “I am getting reacquainted with my friend.”  
  
Nicolò chuckles deeper and warmer and it wraps around Yusuf like a woollen blanket. “Please?” he requests, and of course Yusuf cannot deny him.  
  
He hovers over Nicolò, propped up on his hands, and brushes their noses together twice before he gives Nicolò the kiss he had asked for. “Shall I put you in my lap?” Yusuf asks. “So that you may use me for your pleasure? Take what you need from me, watch as you tear the both of us to shreds with your sinful hips?”  
  
Nicolò groans and his eyes close. He nods eagerly. “Yes. Please, Yusuf.”  
  
“I told you, you must stop thinking you have to ask.” As he speaks, Yusuf reaches for the oil he knows is waiting in a dark green vial on the nightstand. They have not made love yet, since they have been in Tunis, but Nicolò will have set it there anyhow on their first night so that they would be prepared when the time came. “Everything you desire from me is already yours. It always has been.”  
  
“I love you,” Nicolò whispers. “So much that sometimes I cannot think of anything else.”  
  
“You are my sky,” Yusuf mumbles in response. He pulls the stopper from the vial and on instinct, Nicolò’s legs spread, one lifting to wrap around Yusuf’s waist so that Yusuf can reach down below the swell of his bollocks without changing his position. He rubs a slick fingertip over the tight, furled opening, feeling it relax under his practiced ministrations, and speaks into Nicolò’s kiss-swollen lips. “You are my moon and my stars, my raging sea and my peaceful morning.”  
  
“You are all that and so much more. The man I was, before I knew you, is not the man I was meant to be,” Nicolò says. His breath catches as Yusuf’s fingertip breaches him. Yusuf has to close his eyes and grit his teeth to keep control, Nicolò’s beautiful noises travelling down Yusuf’s spine and right to his own swollen, needy cock.  
  
“No,” he agrees, sliding his finger further inside, stars sparkling behind his eyes at the warmth, the pull of Nicolò’s body, the way it grips even a single finger. “No, you were not meant for war and fear and shame. You were meant to be loved, Nicolò.”  
  
Nicolò sighs his name, the syllables falling sweetly from his lips as his eyes slip closed. Yusuf just marvels at him as he moves his finger, stretching the tight channel. He is stunning like this, with his reddened lips parted and a pink tinge to his cheeks, moisture beading around his hairline.  
  
Yusuf leans down to kiss his forehead, needing Nicolò to know nothing but gentle touches and loving embraces after they year they spent in such darkness. Nicolò, he knows, wants the same for him in return. Nicolò was used to violence, when they first met. Yusuf was not. Nicolò is the one who taught Yusuf how to be a warrior, with his wide hands and his strength and his grit, while Yusuf taught him how to appreciate the beauty around them and allow tenderness into his heart. There are many, many days when Yusuf is grateful for all he has learned from Nicolò’s example, but not today. Today he wants them to exist only in silk sheets and dozy smiles and devoted passes of their lips over each other’s skin that feel like the marriage vows they never needed to take.  
  
“Ah,” Nicolò moans, breathless, when Yusuf crooks his finger and finds the spot deep inside that feels like a forest fire raging through his body. Yusuf knows it so well, from all the times their positions are reversed.  
  
Yusuf grins, pleased with himself, and kisses the corner of Nicolò’s open mouth as he passes again over the spot, and again and again, until Nicolò is rocking down lustfully against his hand. It is such a thrill, dark and bright all at once, to see him this way; eager for Yusuf’s touch, unashamed of the things Yusuf can make him feel. Lost in passion, in sensation, mindless and so wondrously beautiful it steals Yusuf’s breath from his lungs.  
  
He adds a second finger at Nicolò’s urging, the first press of them difficult but only for a moment before Nicolò relaxes on a deep exhale and his body opens like the bloom of a flower for Yusuf. His fingers spread, creating space, asking Nicolò with his body and his soul to allow him inside so they can be one again, as they were always meant to be.  
  
“You are – ”  
  
“No,” Nicolò interrupts. When Yusuf frowns and looks down into his darkened, sea-green eyes, Nicolò smiles blearily at him and his hands lift to hold Yusuf’s cheeks between them. “No more words, beautiful man, I beg you. Just show me.”  
  
Yusuf exhales emotionally through his nose and kisses Nicolò deeply, overcome for a moment as he always is when he remembers the breadth of their love for each and the ofttimes different ways they chose to speak of it. For Nicolò, it is not always in spoken language.  
  
“As you wish,” he says softly into their kiss.  
  
He withdraws his fingers, not missing the way Nicolò cannot hold back a tiny whimper at the loss of them, and rearranges. He sits, reclined against the plush cushions, and reaches for Nicolò, helping the man to climb over him with a knee pressing to either side of Yusuf’s hips. Yusuf finds the oil again and pours some over himself, drawing the inside of his cheek between his teeth at the sensation as he spreads it around. Between them Nicolò’s cock bobs, and Yusuf cannot resist reaching out to curl his fingers around it, just for a stroke or two. Nicolò licks his lips and his smile is fond, resting one hand on Yusuf’s shoulder and reaching down with the other to take Yusuf’s cock in his hand and hold it upright.  
  
Yusuf tilts his chin up to ask for a kiss, which Nicolò readily gives him, and together they help him sink down onto Yusuf, his slick body accepting Yusuf’s into it, inch by glorious inch. Every bit of him that disappears into Nicolò is greeted with warmth, like slipping into a bath, like falling at the end of a tiring day into Nicolò’s waiting arms. Nicolò trembles above him and Yusuf wraps an arm securely around his waist to hold him close, taking his weight, until the backs of his thighs settle heavily onto the tops of Yusuf’s.  
  
“Do you feel it?” he asks in a low voice, a secret kept in the minute space between their faces. “Everything I wanted to say, everything you wanted me to demonstrate instead?”  
  
“Yes.” Nicolò rolls his hips, slowly, and his fingers grip handfuls of Yusuf’s hair as he rests their foreheads together. “Always.”  
  
Yusuf holds him as he begins to move, hands curled securely around Nicolò’s hips. Small circles of his hips turn into lifting them up and lowering himself back down, Yusuf’s cock sliding in and out of him, smooth from the oil and the time they had spent preparing but Nicolò’s body still grips him. Yusuf sees stars again as the pace increases, as Nicolò’s soft grunts turn to louder moans, as ecstasy graces his handsome face.  
  
“Find it,” Yusuf commands, pulling Nicolò forwards so that he has to brace himself on Yusuf’s shoulders. He wiggles, changing the angle once or twice and then his mouth falls open and Yusuf takes advantage, pushing his hips up roughly, his cock drilling into the spot inside Nicolò that makes his body shake in Yusuf’s arms.  
  
“ _Dio_ ,” Nicolò swears, rocking back against Yusuf, chasing his own pleasure. Yusuf’s stomach swoops at the sight of him, sweat on his flushed face, stomach clenching as he moves, swollen cock bouncing between them. Yusuf grabs for it, stroking it in time with Nicolò’s movements in his lap. Beneath the cover of soft skin, Nicolò leaks copious fluid and Yusuf spreads it around eagerly.  
  
They transcend time, when they are together in this way. Sometimes Yusuf thinks they could rut against each other from sunrise to sunset, other times he wonders if it’s been scarcely longer than a minute before they are groaning out their climaxes and collapsing into each other, exhausted and happy. Perhaps they transcend space, as well – perhaps the magic they create between their bodies temporarily spins them into another world, a place that exists only for them, where no one can touch them. If they could figure out how to stay, they would never have to hurt again. Nicolò would never have to hurt again. Despite all they would have to give up, Yusuf would be lying if he said he would not consider it.  
  
Nicolò finishes first. He shudders against Yusuf, the most beautiful and breathless noises spilling from his lips as his cock spills between their bodies. Yusuf strokes him firmly, squeezing the pulsing organ in his hand, and then loosening his grip as Nicolò shivers. With their foreheads still pressed together Yusuf watches, enraptured, at the milky strands are laid over his own stomach, bright against his skin.  
  
“Oh,” Nicolò sighs, as Yusuf twists his wrist and Nicolò’s cock dribbles a final, half-hearted bit of moisture, gleaming brightly at its tip.  
  
Yusuf longs to get his mouth upon it, to taste the salt on him, but could not from this position. Instead, he swipes a fingertip through the slick on his belly. He brings it up into the space between them and spreads it over Nicolò’s lower lip so he can clean it off with his tongue.  
  
Nicolò exhales heavily as Yusuf captures his mouth in a slow, warm kiss. “The way you tighten around me as you spill over my fingers,” he says, unsteadily into the smear of their lips, that tastes like salt and like them.  
  
“The way you pulse inside me, filling every leftover space,” Nicolò answers, rocking his hips slowly, so Yusuf’s cock slides around inside him, indicating for Yusuf to move again. “Please, Yusuf, I need it.”  
  
“You want me to make a mess of you?” Yusuf asks, grinning to himself when Nicolò hums and his eyes flutter closed. He holds Nicolò’s hips in his hands, suspended just slightly off his thighs so he has space to press himself up into Nicolò’s body.  
  
“ _Yes_ , please.”  
  
Yusuf holds him carefully, one palm pressing into the small of Nicolò’s back and the other curled supportively around the curve of his ribs. He could – and has – simply flip them over, toss Nicolò roughly to the bounce of the mattress, take what he needs from his body. It continues to feel like a different sort of evening. Instead Yusuf gently helps Nicolò to his back on the bed, hovering over him so their eyes can meet.  
  
A small smile curves the sweet bow of Nicolò’s lips, gazing fondly up at Yusuf with the majesty of the heavens sparkling in his clear, endless eyes. As Yusuf carefully enters him again, he kisses those lips, and glows in the rumble of the low moan that emanates from Nicolò as he is filled. Yusuf’s love for the man underneath him is wider than the night sky, it is deeper than the ocean, it burns hotter than the most arid desert. Nicolò’s arms wrap tightly around him, keeping Yusuf close to him as he slowly pursues the pleasure building in his belly and gives happily into it.  
  
Nicolò nuzzles into Yusuf’s damp neck as Yusuf moans his name and fills him, leaving his insides warm and slippery. Yusuf can never resist letting his hips push forward until it edges toward uncomfortable and then just once or twice more, loath to give up the feeling. Nicolò hums quietly, a soft, satisfied sound, and his fingertips scratch through Yusuf’s hair.  
  
For another minute or two Yusuf stays collapsed against him, unwilling to move until he absolutely must. “Am I crushing you?” he asks, regretfully.  
  
“No. I love when you surround me.” As Nicolò says it, his body betrays him. He grunts, leg moving below Yusuf’s and swearing softly, attempting to stretch out the cramp without knocking Yusuf off.  
  
Yusuf kisses his cheek and carefully removes himself. He lies on the bed next to Nicolò, watching as Nicolò sits up and massages a spot on his calf. When the knot has released, he turns his gaze to Yusuf’s and laughs sheepishly, leaning over and draping himself over Yusuf’s chest. Yusuf folds Nicolò into his arms and runs his nose through Nicolò’s sweat-damp hair.  
  
Nicolò exhales, the tickle of his breath sliding across Yusuf’s chest, ruffling the hair there. Yusuf’s hand travels, the backs of his fingers trailing down Nicolò’s spine and lower. He finds the loose, slick rim of his entrance. It always tightens so quickly; Nicolò’s body healing at its wildly accelerated pace, so Yusuf likes to play with it while he can, tugging at the edges, feeling where it had yielded to accept him inside.  
  
Nicolò twitches against him and a soft whimper spills from his lips.  
  
“Too sensitive?” Yusuf asks in a whisper and to his relief Nicolò shakes his head, his nose brushing through Yusuf’s beard.  
  
Yusuf feels what he’d left there begin to ooze back out over his fingers. He closes his eyes and inhales the scent of them and imagines – because he knows, can picture it perfectly behind his eyelids – what it would look like. When his fingers are coated enough, he pushes it back inside with two of them, gently thrusting into him, feeling the delightful mess of it.  
  
When Nicolò whimpers again, Yusuf leaves him be, withdrawing his fingers carefully. He gives Nicolò’s hole one last swipe of his thumb just to feel him shiver, and then drags his sticky fingers up Nicolò’s spine.  
  
“I need another bath,” Nicolò says conversationally, but Yusuf can feel lips smiling against his collarbone.  
  
“No,” Yusuf argues. He drags the fingers of his clean hand through Nicolò’s hair. “You smell exactly like you should. Like love-making and like me.”  
  
“You want me to smell like you?”  
  
“Yes. At all times. I cannot mark you up in any way that would last but I wish I could. So when we would go out, everyone who looks at you, sees how beautiful you are, they would all know you’re mine.”  
  
“I am, even if they cannot see it.”  
  
Yusuf’s eyes close again, lips finding Nicolò’s forehead to press a long kiss against it. He is comfortable and warm, lounging with the one he loves in a place where they are safe, a place where they could touch each other and pleasure each other and then float in the remaining embers of it.  
  
Nicolò’s fingers brush slowly, lightly, along the pathway of Yusuf’s arm, down toward his wrist. They encircle it for a moment before they continue their journey over the length of Yusuf’s slender fingers, Nicolò threading his own thicker ones in for a moment. Then he takes Yusuf’s hand and brings it up to his mouth. Nicolò’s lips kiss the tops of his knuckles, the joint of his thumb, then turning it over, presses two kisses to his open palm. The hands Yusuf uses to touch him, to hold him, to protect him.  
  
Perhaps it is the act of finally slowing down that brings up everything he has been fighting to keep tampered down. Perhaps it is in giving himself the space to feel what he has been suppressing for so long, that flares those emotions like uncontrollable flames. There had not been room for it, as they followed Andromache up and down the English coast for those many months. Her grief, her devastation, had necessarily been the priority, and anything Yusuf and Nicolò had felt was pushed into the background. There was no place else to put everything he’d felt, so Yusuf had spooled it inside.  
  
“Darling,” Nicolò breathes, feeling the storm of it emerging because he knows Yusuf better than anyone ever has, or could.  
  
Yusuf shakes his head, unable to speak as tears burn behind his eyes and spill down his cheeks.  
  
Nicolò pulls him, rearranges them until Yusuf is cradled against his chest, wrapped safely in his arms. Yusuf feels surrounded, and utterly helpless to cease the tremble of his shoulders as long-held grief finally makes its way from his tattered soul. Misery turns to salt in his eyes and drips onto Nicolò’s chest.  
  
“My heart, please do not cry,” Nicolò whispers, and before Yusuf can respond, Nicolò kindly amends it; “or, if to cry is what you need in this moment, then carry on, and I will hold you.”  
  
* * *  
  
It is ten days before all that they are running from manages to catch up to them again, to find them in their quiet, warm, sun-soaked paradise.  
  
They carve out a bit of heaven for each other. Ten days of moonlit walks on quiet streets, of Yusuf drawing Nicolò like he suggested in all manner of dress, including none at all. Nicolò has a form made to be sketched and painted, his shoulders impossibly broad, his thighs impossibly strong, his profile imperial in its construction, his green-eyed gaze sharp and exacting. Yusuf feels it is barely any work at all, to transfer all that beauty to the page. It is as if Nicolò simply exists and the brush in Yusuf’s hand moves itself in his image.  
  
Ten days of the rich, lustrous slide of their lips together when Nicolò kisses him _hello_ in the mornings. Ten days of laughter, over things that would not amuse anyone but the two of them. Ten days of Yusuf ravishing his beloved, and being ravished by him in return, their bodies fitting together as they always have, like two halves of the same whole. Yusuf was incomplete, before he found the other half of his soul. He hadn’t known it, then. He knows it now. It is inescapable.  
  
Ten days of love, of held hands, of kisses pressed to bare shoulders, until it shatters.  
  
Yusuf does not see it coming. It is mid-afternoon, and the sun is gleaming in through their window, casting long shadows over the furniture and bathing the room in a warm, orange glow. Yusuf is on the bed, resting on one hip and propped up at the elbow, drawing idle shapes with a quill that is much nicer than the sort he is used to. The craftsmanship is impeccable, the ink flows smooth and even onto the parchment as he drags its tip across the page. Nicolò is in a chair by the window, staring contemplatively out at the view with his hands folded in his lap.  
  
It is not a strange occurrence. Nicolò is a deeply introspective man. He has always been the quieter and more thoughtful of the two of them, always the one who becomes trapped in his mind in prolonged moments of stillness. Ofttimes, Yusuf does not ask what he was thinking when Nicolò emerges from his reverie. Nicolò will tell him some days, and other days he does not.  
  
So, he does not expect it, when Nicolò’s soft voice asks, “how long would you search for me?”  
  
At first, Yusuf is not sure he has heard correctly. “Pardon?”  
  
Nicolò exhales slowly, his shoulders lifting up and then falling back down. He looks at Yusuf, briefly, with trepidation in his gaze. “How long would you search for me?” he repeats. “If I were the one at the bottom of the ocean.”  
  
Yusuf gapes at him. He cannot fathom how it is even a question Nicolò needs to ask. It hurt enough when Andromache asked it. “Forever. What I told Andromache is the truth, not something said in anger. I would never stop looking for you.”  
  
“We did not last a year,” Nicolò says. His head tips forward, eyes focusing on his folded hands. “Do we love her less than we love each other?”  
  
“We have not stopped looking for Quynh.” Yusuf pushes himself to a seated position, the quill abandoned on the parchment, feathered end smearing the damp ink.  
  
“Haven’t we?”  
  
Yusuf frowns deeply, disturbed to imagine Nicolò has been ruminating on these feelings for more than a week and kept them hidden inside while Yusuf thought they were happy. Nicolò is a quiet, contemplative person, but not usually secretive. At least, not from Yusuf.  
  
“I did not need a reprieve from searching for Quynh. I needed a reprieve from watching Andromache murder herself day in and day out. If you want to go back, we can go back.”  
  
Nicolò looks up at him with eyes swimming in tears. “We aren’t going to find her.”  
  
Yusuf scowls. “You cannot know that.”  
  
“I do know it, and so do you,” Nicolò argues. Frustration leaks into his trembling voice. “Andromache has threatened every man on that ship. Terrified them, tortured them. Half of them wet themselves. Several of them are dead by her sword when she lost her temper. And we achieved nothing. What more is there to be done?”  
  
“You would not look for me this long?” Yusuf asks. He stands and stares at Nicolò in shock and anger. “Is that the point of all this? To tell me that you would give up on me before a year had even gone by?”  
  
“No,” Nicolò answers. “The point is just what I said. That we are not going to find her. Not now, not after this much time. You know it.”  
  
Yusuf huffs, annoyed and heartbroken, but admits, “yes. Alright. I know it.”  
  
“And yet, you say if it were me, you would never give up.”  
  
Shaking his head in upset and confusion, Yusuf asks, “does this mean you wish to stop looking for good? To leave our remaining sister alone in her grief, her madness?”  
  
“We _did_ leave her alone. She needed us and we abandoned her.” Nicolò so rarely shouts. His fury is always quiet, cold, controlled. But it simmers so palpably below the surface of his calm, and Yusuf can feel it filling the room and stealing the air from his lungs, even though Nicolò’s voice does not raise.  
  
“I hardly dragged you away with your hands tied,” he points out. “If you did not wish to leave her, then why did you?”  
  
Nicolò looks away. His jaw clenches, Yusuf can see the muscle moving in it, and a tear slides down his cheek.  
  
Yusuf closes his own eyes against the sting. He despises when they argue. It is inevitable that there be differences in opinion when they have been together such a long time. They have had disagreements, they have angered each other and annoyed each other and hurt each other, but he always longs for it to be over the moment it begins so they can arrive back at the place where there is nothing but love between them. He moves toward Nicolò across the room, sinking slowly to his knees in front of him, hands moving tentatively along the tops of Nicolò’s thighs.  
  
“Hayati,” he murmurs, wishing Nicolò would look at him. When Nicolò does, Yusuf takes back his wish. It hurts deep in his soul, to see those beautiful eyes filled with tears.  
  
“I am not angry with you because I think you would stop searching for me,” Nicolò whispers. “I’m angry with you because I think you wouldn’t.”  
  
Yusuf frowns, taking Nicolò’s hands in his own, cradling them, bringing them up to press his lips into the knuckles. Nicolò leans forward, his head resting against Yusuf’s, sharing the air between them.  
  
“I can too easily picture you just like Andromache, chopping off the heads of strangers, drowning yourself, losing every scrap of gentleness in you that I love so dearly,” Nicolò says softly. “When we fought, we struggled, we worked so long to get past our anger, to unlearn our ignorance, to dispel all the lies I had been told and the way they had hardened my heart. We could so easily descend back down into that darkness.”  
  
“I would search for you until the end of the world. I will not lie to you and pretend that’s not the truth.”  
  
“I know you would. And it breaks my heart, Yusuf. To think that one day I might be trapped somewhere, and I will have to know you are out there in the world, not dancing, not laughing, not sharing your generous heart with the people around you, but slowly succumbing to madness. I would not want that for you. I would want you to live.”  
  
“You cannot ask that of me,” Yusuf rasps, eyes closed and breathing Nicolò into his lungs. “Not when my heart only beats because yours does. You cannot ask me to forget you.”  
  
“I know. I know, my love. You cannot ask it of me, either. But it remains a miserable thought.”  
  
Yusuf nods.  
  
His forehead rubs against Nicolò’s and they stay, for a while, just like that. When Nicolò speaks again, his voice is barely a whisper of breath, to say, “I miss her desperately.”  
  
Yusuf does not know whether he means Quynh or Andromache. He supposes it’s likely both, although Nicolò was always so close with Quynh. She took to him immediately, when they had only just found each other, and always seemed to be pulled to him like they were magnets. They were always kindred spirits. Yusuf is more heartbroken than he can say, but perhaps losing her has wounded Nicolò more.  
  
“Perhaps we should not have come here.”  
  
“I will not say it hasn’t been enjoyable.”  
  
A small smile curls the corners of Yusuf’s lips and he brushes his nose against Nicolò’s. “It has been a dream.”  
  
“I had so yearned for your touch.”  
  
“I was so afraid I was losing you. We were surrounded by such agony, I wanted to snatch you up and take you away from it before we did not recognize ourselves anymore.”  
  
“I was afraid of losing you, as well,” Nicolò tells him, “but I was wrong in that fear. I see that, now. I could never lose you in that way. Not while you remain standing next to me.”  
  
“Never,” Yusuf agrees readily. “Do you want to return to her?”  
  
Nicolò nods. “Yes. We have to. She should not be alone. I hate that we’ve left her alone.”  
  
Yusuf breathes heavily and nods in agreement.  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Pendle Witches](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendle_witches)  
> Ottoman Tunisia [x](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Tunisia) [x](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_clothing#Tanzimat_period)  
> [1612 Battle of Moscow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_of_Troubles#Battle_of_Moscow)


	8. Saint-Domingue, 1791

_“Who e’er in pale dismay has watched the angel form they could not save, and seen their dearest blessing torn away?”_  
 _Charlotte Turner Smith, 1797_  
  
  
They have been in Virginia for nearly thirteen years when they are reached by news of the Caribbean uprising.  
  
They had stowed away on a ship crossing the Atlantic in the late 1770s as tensions rose in the Colonies, and had, since it was more difficult in that particular conflict to assign right or wrong to either side, assisted in the medical tents. Bayonets cause more carnage than Nicholas had ever seen. He has been mired in violence for as long as he can remember and he’d experienced nothing that could have prepared him for it. When a human body is run through with a broadsword, death is often quick. With poorly aimed bullets, it is very, very slow.  
  
Joseph, in particular, has been fascinated with the idea of nation-building so they stayed after the war was won, working in a tavern in the new capital. They earn enough to purchase a small sailboat for Andrea so that she can go out into the ocean and continue searching for the other half of her heart, still trapped under the sea. Joseph and Nicholas do not accompany her anymore. They haven’t in years. She asked them not to, and so they don’t. Nicholas suspects it was not because she did not want their help, but because she could finally see the harm it was causing them to watch her drown herself and took pity on them.  
  
There is revolution in France. Kings who have ruled their lands with iron fists, since a time well before Nicholas was born, are being thrown out and executed. Power is falling to the hands of the people instead. Nicholas does not like the violence, he never likes violence, but he is old enough to understand sometimes necessary changes are impossible without bloodshed. He thought they should be there, assisting, as they were here. Andrea said _no_. They do not argue with her.  
  
It was not always like this. He easily remembers a time when she was their leader but they were a family. When they discussed and argued and listened to each other. Now, she gives the word and they obey.  
  
It is a still, muggy day in the middle of August when a young man called Henry bursts frantically into the tavern with a letter in his hand, and to the interested throng he shouts, “the slaves have taken Saint-Domingue!”  
  
Chaos is instant. Men leap to their feet and surround him, crying for further information, listening with bated breath as he reads it to them.  
  
Across the bar, Nicholas meets Joseph’s widened, glistening eyes. They stare, unspoken words passing easily between them through the din, and when Andrea steps out from behind Joseph and joins the silent conversation, her short nod is their permission.  
  
* * *  
  
Nicholas still does not fare well on small ships that bounce along the waves. Shipping technology has improved at a thoroughly impressive speed in the last century, which only means the voyage is not nearly long enough for him to find solid sea-legs underneath him before the island is in view on the horizon. In another time and place, Joseph and Andrea might have lovingly teased him about it. This time they stay silent.  
  
They arrive in September. Weeks late from the beginning of the revolt, the island that – centuries before European hands ever touched it would have been a beautiful, lush, melodic place – is stained in blood. Bodies litter the streets, coffee and cocoa plantations have been burned to the ground, the smell of decay and gunpowder lingers in the humid air. A row of something unrecognizable on pikes surrounds the distant fort that they walk towards, and Nicholas’s stomach churns violently when they are close enough to realize.  
  
“My God,” Joseph whispers.  
  
They keep moving past them, and Nicholas cannot look. The disembodied heads of French children on spikes float in his periphery like ghosts, with their putrefying eyes and slack jaws.  
  
“French masters were especially cruel,” Andrea says, staring determinedly ahead and speaking through clenched teeth. Trying to justify it to herself, more than them. Nicholas and Joseph know it already, it has never been a secret. “Constantly terrified of revolt, they sought to maintain control through fear of torture. Their children paid the price.”  
  
Shaken but undeterred, she leads them on. None of them should be surprised by the depths of what humans can do to each other, as old as they are and as much as they have seen, but they still are. Nicholas supposes that means their hearts have not been corrupted, and on another day, he could be grateful for that. It feels impossible, at this moment.  
  
Nearer to a large tent that seems to be the source of the din of voices, they are ambushed. Nicholas counts seven men, skin much darker than Joseph’s and military uniforms of a deep blue indicating their status, who emerge like an explosion from behind trees and bushes and grab them. They are dragged into the tent, where a man standing over a table spread with maps and plans looks up at them as they’re tossed to the dirt at his feet.  
  
“Spies, General,” one of their captors reports. “We caught them approaching.”  
  
The General’s eyes narrow and he stands slowly, stepping around the table and glaring at them with daggers in his gaze.  
  
“We are not,” Joseph says bravely. “My name is Joseph. We have come from Virginia, where we fought at Yorktown when the Colonies secured their freedom from Britain. We would like to do the same, here. With you.”  
  
Smirking, the General squats down in front of him. “Hello, Joseph. My name is Toussaint L’Ouverture. It was nice to meet you, just before your death.”  
  
As he stands, Nicholas feels his heart beating roughly against his chest like a drum, but Joseph remains calm as he states, “you must know France will be sending an army that will outman you. They’re likely already on their way across the sea. We have a number of special skills. Let us help you.”  
  
L’Ouverture laughs again. “Two men with medieval swords and a woman? And you’re suggesting that you three alone can overpower an army?”  
  
“We are asking to join you.”  
  
“I must confess, of all the French spies we have captured, you lot are certainly the most amusing,” he jokes, to the scattered laughter of his men.  
  
“Do we sound French to you?” Joseph shouts, and that seems to catch the General’s attention. His forehead wrinkles into a frown and considers it.  
  
“No,” he says after a moment. “And you, at least, don’t look it.”  
  
“I was born in the North of Africa,” Joseph tells him. “The heart of our beautiful continent beats within me.”  
  
“I was born here, in this Hell,” L’Ouverture returns with a snarl. “I have never seen it.”  
  
“I’m sorry for that.” Joseph licks his lips nervously, and Nicholas can still barely breathe.  
  
“And them?” L’Ouverture asks, gesturing behind Joseph toward the other two.  
  
“Poland and Italy,” he explains. “I know you have no reason to trust us but I promise we are on your side.”  
  
L’Ouverture snorts and two of his men laugh, but when he turns back to them, his expressive face has softened in consideration.  
  
Quietly, Andrea says, “We came to help, General. You are worthy of your freedom, and if they will not give it to you willingly, we are here to help you take it.”  
  
L’Ouverture shakes his head and exhales through his nose, but then waves a hand at them. “Fine. I do not have time for this. As you wish, but know this: I will waste no resources in seeing to your safety. If my men see their white skin and assume you are the enemy, on your own head be it.”  
  
“Understood,” Joseph says with a nod. He does not mention that it won’t matter.  
  
* * *  
  
Nicholas loses track of how often they die in the following months.  
  
He becomes numb to the pain, to the stench of rotting blood, to the screams of agony and anguish that become their orchestral score. Regrowing limbs has always been the worst of the ways they heal, and more than once he has to watch in gut-churning horror as Joseph or Andrea whimpers and sweats and a new hand or leg materializes from a bloody stump.  
  
They know nothing but violence. He thinks to himself, in rare idle moments, that it will take years in a quiet place by the seaside to relearn how to smile. They might never know quiet years again. War has always been part of their lives but it is steadily becoming worse. The time between conflicts is shrinking until Nicholas is sure that someday, there will never again be a time when they are not covered in someone else’s blood.  
  
Andrea is horrifyingly ruthless. Nicholas and Joseph watch in dulled dismay as she cuts her way through armies, as she spins into a throng and emerges as the only one left alive with dozens of bodies on the ground around her, as she seems to relish in it. They have always been regretful. They have always fought and brandished their weapons and ended lives but it has always been in service of helping, of saving, of striving for a better world. They have never rejoiced in it. Now, Andrea slices a throat with her ancient labrys, and then another, and then another, and steps over the corpses with blood and a cruel smile on her face.  
  
They do not discuss it. For two years they do not discuss it. For two years they _survive_ instead of living and wash French blood from their hands.  
  
For two years they barely speak at all, or eat, or sleep, and Nicholas forgets what Joseph’s kiss tastes like. His skin forgets touch that does not cause pain, his body forgets what it’s like to be cradled in someone’s arms. Something much deeper inside him forgets that he is worthy of love and tenderness. Nicholas wonders how many lives he has taken with his own hands, all added up together. How many souls he has freed from their Earthly vessels. He wonders if it outnumbers the souls he has saved. He wonders if the stain from it on his own soul will ever wash out, or if he is now, irreversibly, a creature of violence and destruction.  
  
In late summer, 1793, the French commissioners surrender and announce abolition. The fighting ends. Andrea collapses near the banks of the Southern shore and Nicholas runs to her, gathering her up in his arms as she pants heavily.  
  
“Get off me,” she screeches at him but he resists, squeezing her writhing body until it succumbs and she goes limp in his arms.  
  
She screams. A guttural, animal roar. Loud, anguished sobs claw from her throat, her frame shaking with the force of them, and tears soak through Nicholas’s shirt.  
  
“I have you, Andromache,” he whispers harshly, as Joseph descends to his knees on her other side and wraps his arms around them both. “We’re here, always.”  
  
She does not answer. She only weeps.  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Haitian Revolution](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_Revolution)   
>  [The Siege of Yorktown](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Yorktown_\(1781\))   
>  [General Toussaint L'Ouverture](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toussaint_Louverture)


	9. Smolensk, 1812

_“I will not let you go into the unknown alone.”_  
 _Bram Stoker, 1897_  
  
  
A harsh, labored gasp.  
  
Hands flailing, reaching, grasping for a thick rope. A noose around a reddened neck.  
  
Another sharp inhale. The sound of choking, of distress, of panic. Fingers paw frantically at the noose, as damp, dark blond hair falls over a twisted forehead. The man cries out. He thrashes uselessly against the restraints. The bones in his neck break with a sickening _crack_ against the weight of his body.  
  
Joseph springs upright, hands flying to his own neck as he feels it break. His heart thuds in his chest, quick and loud enough that for a moment it feels like he must be dying, that the organ must be about to burst like a firework in his chest. The dark room around him seems to spin, as if he’s falling and falling and falling and then finally he lands with a jolt back into reality. He pants, breaths drawing quick and painfully into his aching lungs. He hands tremble, fumbling to feel for the bones underneath them in his neck and chest, but he’s alright.  
  
They aren’t broken at all. He’s alive.  
  
His shoulders slump. Next to him, Nicholas is still lying flat on his back but his chest is heaving and his eyes are wide open. In the darkness Joseph meets his gaze, finds it wild and fearful and with a sudden spark of understanding that fires through the confusion like a lightning strike, he realizes – Nicholas had it, too. The dream. The nightmare.  
  
“You …?” Nicholas asks and Joseph nods.  
  
He keeps touching his neck, unable to stop running his fingers over where he’d _felt_ his bones break, his muscles tear, his windpipe crumple like a piece of rolled paper in a tightly clenched fist. His heart will not slow, either. It still hammers into his ribcage and leaves him dizzy and reeling.  
  
“What on earth was …?”  
  
He doesn’t get an answer to his question before, from the ground next to Nicholas’s side of the bed, Andrea’s flat, quiet voice says, “fuck.”  
  
Joseph frowns, blinking in the shadows and at the same time he and Nicholas scramble over to the edge of the bed, elbows bumping as they both peer over it so they can see her. She’s on her makeshift bed of sofa cushions and an extra blanket and Nicholas’s pillow. Her arms are flayed out to her sides, hanging limply off the floor, and her lips are parted in labored breaths like theirs.  
  
“Androm – ”  
  
“Fuck!” Andrea bellows, not letting Nicholas finish her name. Her hands fly up to cover her face, pressing down so that the anguished noise she makes is mostly muffled into her own palms. Her feet kick, the blanket catching on them and ending up askew around her bare legs.  
  
Still breathing heavily, Nicholas looks back at Joseph, who shakes his head in the same worry and utter confusion. At least one of them seems to understand what is going on, although it would be nice if she could speed up the process of telling them.  
  
“Another one,” Andrea says after a beat, removing her hands so she can look up at them with her own wide-eyed, slack-jawed stare.  
  
“Another _what_?” Nicholas asks, but Joseph gets there before he does.  
  
He swears, too, although softer and under his breath. “Another one of us. He … did we just see him die?”  
  
“Yes,” Andrea answers, flat and emotionless.  
  
“I felt it,” Nicholas says, shuddering a little. “Like I was the one being hanged.”  
  
“It wasn’t like that, when we dreamt of you,” Joseph says to Andrea, not understanding again, but as she stares intensely at the ceiling above and shakes her head minutely, he does. “Oh. Because you were already immortal when Nicolò and I …”  
  
She intones another dull affirmative and her throat clicks as she swallows. Her eyes move, twitching back and forth in their sockets, like she’s seeing things in her mind’s eye instead of what is really in front of her. Recalling the dream, searching for details.  
  
“I heard him curse in French,” Nicholas says, “as he struggled to get down.”  
  
Trying to hold onto the details of the dream is like trying to hold water in his cupped hands, but Joseph covers his eyes with his palms and strains for pieces of it. “Other men, at the gallows. It wasn’t only him. He was just the only one who did not stay dead.”  
  
“A mutiny of some kind,” Nicholas suggests. “Did you see the battlefield behind him?”  
  
Andrea rigidly adds, “I saw the flag of the Tsar on a half-collapsed building. He is not in France.”  
  
“What does that mean?”  
  
“I have no idea. Maybe that Napoleon has marched into Russia.”  
  
Joseph sighs and settles back a little, posture slumping as the panic thrumming under his veins seems to finally be cooling. Nicholas shifts as well, leaning back just slightly, and Joseph dips his head down to press a kiss to Nicholas’s shoulder.  
  
Still unable to dispel the dream entirely, even as his heartbeat does slow, he incredulously asks, “was it that awful? When you dreamt of us, and of …?”  
  
Nicholas gasps a breath quickly through his nose. Below them on the ground, Andrea’s eyes slip closed and her brow furrows, jaw clenching like she’s suddenly in pain. It is a morning of unspoken realizations, and this one comes to Nicholas before it dawns on Joseph.  
  
“Quynh,” he whispers. “It’s the 18th of August.”  
  
For just one extra heartbeat, one more moment of innocence, Joseph remains in the dark. Then it hits him, too, like the butt of a rifle to the ribcage.  
  
Two hundred years, precisely to the day, since they lost her.  
  
It is Joseph’s turn to mumble a curse under his breath and fall back onto the mattress. If it always happens on anniversaries, if Andrea knows one way or the other, she doesn’t say. She just lies in silence, and Nicholas reclines back as well. His hand sneaks over and slips into Joseph’s, a small amount of comfort that is not anything near what either of them need, but for the moment it is the best they can offer each other.  
  
Joseph is the worst of them at keeping track of the date but August 18th, 1612 has lived forever vividly in his mind, and so too now will the morning of August 18th, 1812, as they pack up their meager belongings from a hotel room in Munich and board a train for Moscow.  
  
* * *  
  
They find him three weeks later in Smolensk; a smaller, ancient city to the West. Or rather, it was. By the time the three of them arrive under the cover of nighttime darkness, it is almost completely destroyed. Rubble piles in the streets as if there’s been an earthquake. The smolder of fire still lingers, in embers and ash and the acrid cover of smoke hanging in the air. Decaying bodies are littered about like leaves in autumn, blood and carnage left over, painting the destruction with the ghosts of those who did not escape.  
  
The place they dreamt of is not difficult to locate. Hastily constructed gallows, from lengths of timber fastened together with ropes and nails, are at the edge of what used to be the city. Joseph counts fifteen other lost souls, their deteriorating bodies still hanging there, swaying hauntingly in the breeze. Their eyes, open but lifeless, he finds impossible to look at. He feels as if they can see him still, as if their vacant stares are begging for an explanation, condemning him of the sin of being three weeks too late to save them.  
  
There is an empty space and a noose that has been untied and is hanging freely, in the fifth spot from the left. The man they’d seen managed to get himself down. Joseph shudders to think of how long that had taken, of how many times he’d died, choked, suffocated, before finally getting the knot undone and falling to his knees in the mud with death around him on all sides.  
  
“Split up,” Andrea instructs.  
  
They do as she asks, each heading slowly out in a different direction with the gallows as their morbid center. Joseph steps, with an increasing churning in his stomach, over corpses and the shattered remains of the city. He peers through broken windows, into alleyways, squinting upwards to half-crumbled second stories, trying to place himself in this man’s shoes. When Joseph – Yusuf, then – realized he could not die, he remained for days in the midst of battle. He had dusted himself off and picked up his sword and carried on, because he did not have a choice. Hiding was not an option and would have been futile anyway. He would only have been found as the siege raged on. If he had been left alone, if the invaders had burned the city and then left it to smolder and Joseph had been surrounded by nothing but death and caved-in roofs, where would he have gone?  
  
At least an hour they search, careful not to accidentally retrace their steps, occasionally crossing paths and sending each other sympathetic smiles that turn to grimaces before continuing on. Joseph is carefully climbing a half-smashed wooden staircase to search an upstairs room above what seems to have been a bakery, when he hears a shout. Nicholas’s voice answers, frantic, and Joseph loses his footing and falls to the ground. He lands roughly, on an ankle that turns over and snaps, and he swears and grits in teeth in pain, breathing forcefully for a few moments as it heals. When the hurt subsides, he runs toward the direction of the noise.  
  
At the back end of a shadowy corridor, he finds Nicholas with his posture rounded and his hands out before him, showing his palms, indicating he is not to be considered a threat.  
  
“I will not hurt you,” Nicholas is saying and as Joseph gets closer, he sees the crumpled pile of a man, wedged into a tight corner between a wall and a wooden barrel. The dark blond hair Joseph remembers from his dream is plastered in sweat and filth to his forehead.  
  
The man shouts back in French, brandishing a small knife in front of him. _Get back_ , he cries.  
  
Nicholas tries again, in the man’s own language. “Je ne te blesserai pas.”  
  
“I’m warning you!” the man yells, his eyes growing dramatically wider as he notices Joseph approaching slowly from behind Nicholas.  
  
“It’s alright,” Joseph tells him, trying to smile. His French is weak, unused for decades, but he manages well enough. “We are friends. We are here to help.”  
  
The man’s eyes dart back and forth between them, forehead drawing into pinched confusion as he absorbs Nicholas’s heavily accented French and Joseph’s darker skin. “You are not Russians.”  
  
“No,” Joseph says. He reaches slowly into an inner pocket of his coat, removing a small switchblade. The man snarls and brandishes his own weapon as Joseph removes it. Joseph tugs back the sleeve covering his opposite arm and, still moving gradually and in full view of the man in the corner, he slices into the underside of his forearm. He hisses only slightly at the sting, and then holds it still and lets the man watch as the laceration seals itself back together.  
  
“ _Merde_ ,” the man breathes, slack-jawed and blinking quickly as if he’s worried they are a hallucination.  
  
“We are like you,” Nicholas says. To demonstrate it, he holds his hand out for the blade and repeats Joseph’s act of proof, cutting himself lightly across the hollow of his cheek.  
  
Footsteps approach and in an instant Andrea is beside them, winded and skidding in the dirt. She brushes her hair out of her eyes as the man jumps in surprise at her sudden appearance. Surveying the scene, she catches on quickly and, taking the knife from Nicholas, cuts open her palm so he can see it heal.  
  
“This isn’t real,” the man mutters. The knife falls from his hand, clattering into the dirt, and he covers his face with dirty palms. “You’re not real, I’m imagining you, like before.”  
  
He’d dreamt of them, as they had of him. Joseph exchanges a glance with Nicholas, trying to wordlessly plot out their next move, but Andrea does not wait. She steps forward, kneeling in front of the man. It has been a long time since Joseph has heard the kind of tenderness in her voice as he does when she softly says, “it is real. I’m sorry. But we’re not here to hurt you. We want to help.”  
  
When the man only groans miserably, Nicholas asks, “what happened here?”  
  
“A massacre.” His hands lower, and the gaunt nature of his cheeks becomes apparent without the knife in his hand to distract them. Weeks ago, when they’d dreamt of him, he hadn’t looked like this. “A fucking massacre.”  
  
It hangs between them in the air, the question no one is asking, of how he’d found himself hanged in a line of French soldiers. The townspeople would not have been responsible for it. Joseph wants to know as much as he’s sure the others do, but this isn’t the time for it.  
  
“My name is Andrea. Well, it isn’t, but for now, it is.” She tosses her head back and to the side, directing his attention behind her. “They are Joseph and Nicholas.”  
  
“Sébastien,” the man says. His brow is still furrowed, as he looks at Joseph, and Joseph is not sure he’s ever seen a human man look so much like a puppy-dog who’s been shouted at. “What’s happened to me?”  
  
“The same thing that’s happened to us,” Andrea replies. “I’m afraid I can’t explain it to you scientifically. All I know is, we heal.”  
  
“We can never die?” he asks, sounding distraught over the idea. His hand rubs over his throat, where the rash from the rope has long-since faded away but he can still clearly feel underneath his fingers, if only in his imagination. “I died over and over again in that fucking noose but then I kept waking up. Why did I keep waking up?”  
  
“We don’t know, I’m sorry. I wish we did.” She looks back over her shoulder at Joseph, her face twisted in empathy and sadness. To Sébastien, she adds, “I have been alive for thousands of years.”  
  
“I was born in the eleventh century,” Nicholas offers as further evidence. “In a little house in Genoa that fell down centuries ago. Joseph and I died in the First Crusade.”  
  
“That’s impossible,” Sébastien whispers. He covers his face with his hands again and shakes his head, repeating it like a mantra. “Impossible, fucking impossible.”  
  
Joseph regretfully tells him, “it should be. But here we are. And now we have you.”  
  
Sébastien is still shaking his head and refusing to look at them, chanting _non, non, non_ , under his breath.  
  
Joseph hears Andrea sniff. For a moment they all remain in limbo, hovering around him where he’s still squashed between the wall and the barrel. Then she moves, inching toward him on her knees, approaching him slowly like a wounded animal. Carefully, she reaches out with her hand to curl her fingers over his forearm, and he flinches but does not throw her off.  
  
“Come with us.”  
  
He whimpers unhappily.  
  
“Everyone around you is going to age and die, Sébastien. And you won’t. Your face will stay the same, your wounds will always heal before your eyes like magic. They won’t understand. They’ll think you’re a demon, something to be hunted or locked away.”  
  
Her voice wavers at the end, and Joseph closes his eyes and clenches his molars.  
  
Sébastien mutters, “I have a family. They’re waiting for me, back in Marseille.”  
  
“So did we,” Joseph tells him.  
  
It isn’t entirely the truth, or at least not in quite the same way. It had been years since Nicholas had seen his mother and father, and Joseph had parents and brothers and aunts and uncles but not children or a wife. And Andrea does not remember. But they all had lives they left behind, so they do understand.  
  
“Please come with us?” Andrea asks again, her hand still on his arm.  
  
Finally, he looks up. His eyes are red and swollen, his cheeks wet with tears. “Where?” he whispers.  
  
“I don’t mean to a particular destination. I mean we are your family, now, the three of us. We stay together. You can join us.”  
  
“Do I have to?”  
  
“Of course not,” Nicholas says. “But you are going to outlive everyone you know and then you’ll be alone. I think it would be very lonely, to be on your own.”  
  
Sébastien swallows. His eyes dart between them, looking at Nicholas first, and then Joseph, and then down to Andrea right in front of him. And then slowly, he nods.  
  
* * *  
  
They board a train to Kyiv.  
  
It is three days’ walk to the nearest station, through vast fields and thick forests, and Sébastien is still starving and weak even after the other three share the provisions in their packs. Stale bread and dried meat are enough to sustain them until they can find additional food, but barely. If they could starve to death they would have, but they cannot, so they carry on as their stomachs ache in the emptiness.  
  
On the train they can eat and sleep and replenish themselves, so it is difficult to keep from collapsing in relief onto the benches once they are shut away in their own private car.  
  
“How much do I stink?” Nicholas asks, grinning when Joseph flops down on the scarlet cushioned bench next to him.  
  
“Just as much as the rest of us,” Joseph replies. Without thinking, he leans forward to briefly kiss Nicholas’s lips, and then catches himself when a surprised noise comes from the opposite bench.  
  
Sébastien’s blue eyes are wide.  
  
“Ah,” Nicholas says uneasily. “We are – ”  
  
“Lovers,” Joseph interrupts, not giving Nicholas the opportunity to soften it. He has loved this man far too long to be willing to hide it, even for a new member of their family. “Husbands. In every sense of the word that you can think of. Do you have any issues with that?”  
  
Sébastien frowns at his defiant tone as if it’s momentarily hurt his feelings, but then casually shrugs his shoulders. “Not really, no. What do you think goes on in the army when the nights are long? But who let you get married?”  
  
Joseph eyes him warily just for a moment, searching for insincerity in his face, but finds none. He shrugs himself and answers, “no one let us. We didn’t think to ask anyone for permission.”  
  
Sébastien nods thoughtfully, and correctly asserts, “I suppose when you are an immortal being, the laws of mortal men do not carry much weight.”  
  
“No, they don’t,” Joseph agrees. Satisfied, he takes Nicholas’s hand and brings it to his lips to kiss the back of it.  
  
While Andrea sits next to Sébastien on the bench and tips her head back against the top of it, Joseph notices the man staring at their clasped hands. Not in confusion, this time, but wistfully. Something cold and uncomfortable rolls through Joseph’s chest, and he hastily lets Nicholas’s hand go and folds his own in his lap. Sébastien blinks a few times and then looks out the window.  
  
Joseph isn’t willing to hide for him, but he is willing to temper it, out of empathy for a man who has only just found out he can never see his wife again. Joseph cannot imagine the despair. He cannot imagine Andrea’s despair either, still sitting next to Sébastien with her eyes closed, even though Joseph’s own grief is so large sometimes it feels like it could swallow him whole like an avalanche.  
  
“Would you like to tell us what happened?” Andrea asks, as the train begins to move out of the station and picks up speed, trees whipping past the windows increasingly quickly.  
  
No one needs to ask what she means.  
  
Sébastien fidgets, his dirty fingers picking distractedly at a loose thread on the inner seam of his trousers.  
  
“It’s alright if you do not want to,” Nicholas says kindly. He extends his foot and taps it against the side of Sébastien’s calf. “Really. We understand.”  
  
With a heavy sigh, the man shakes his head. His blond hair, still darkened and stringy with grime, falls over his forehead and partially shields his eyes from view. He doesn’t move it away, hiding behind it. “We attacked at nightfall, they were completely caught off guard. We tore through them like they were nothing and then we burnt it to the ground. Thousands fled, I think. In three days, there was no one left alive.”  
  
No one moves an inch; they wait quietly instead for him to continue. The three of them are used to violence, to death, to carnage. This man, it seems, is not. The waver in his voice and the constant movement of his fingers over that thread betrays how haunted he is by it.  
  
“I watched my countrymen cutting down women and small children, and I couldn’t … I never wanted to be there in the first place.” He sniffs loudly, and his other hand comes up to wipe the heel of his palm underneath his dripping nose. “I couldn’t do it. Killing a soldier before they get the chance to kill you is one thing, but this wasn’t a battle. It was mass execution. I tried to run, but an officer caught me and dragged me back. They locked me up in a cell with the others who tried to get away, and when the battle was over and the city was flattened, they constructed the gallows and strung us up.”  
  
When he does not continue, Joseph gently asks, “and then they left you?”  
  
Sébastien shifts uncomfortably on the bench. “I suppose so. When I woke up, everyone was gone. Except for the others they’d hanged beside me. I do not know how long I was up there, how many times I died before I got down. And then I … there was nothing left in the city, they destroyed it all, but I did not know where to go. When we marched into Russia I just followed the man in front of me, I did not know what direction we’d gone. I did not know how to get home.”  
  
He loses the story as he begins to cry quietly, shoulders shaking with the effort of trying to hold it in even as misery spills out of him. Next to Joseph, Nicholas sniffs and Joseph turns to see his lower lip quivering, that empathetic heart of his bleeding as it always does when another is in distress.  
  
Andrea finally opens her eyes and lifts her head. She meets Joseph’s gaze across the train car, jaw clenching and expression sad but determined, and then she shifts closer to Sébastien on the cushion. She lifts her arm and wraps it around his shoulders, and as if a lack of human contact had been the only thing holding him together, he collapses into her, sobbing loudly into her breast.  
  
“It’s alright,” she whispers, stroking his dirty hair.  
  
“So maybe I’m a fucking coward, so what?” he rasps. “Who the fuck says we all have to be brave?”  
  
Joseph can see Andrea is reluctant to embrace him, to let another into her heart, but selflessly, she does it anyway. Her other arm goes around him, holding him close to her and letting him grieve. “We will take care of you, Sébastien, I promise. We will keep you safe.”  
  
* * *  
  
They rent a room above a butcher shop in Kyiv. There is only one bed, but enough plush cushions on it that they can make a second on the floor that is comfortable enough, and trade off on alternate evenings – Joseph and Nicholas taking the bed one night, and Andrea and Sébastien the next. One by one they bathe, and Nicholas slips out for an hour and returns with food and new clothing for Sébastien and other provisions they’ll need for the coming days.  
  
He doesn’t speak much, their new friend. He mostly stares blankly ahead, sometimes as if he can see shadows of things that are not really there. He eats when they tell him to, and answers questions if he’s asked, but he is a haunted, grieving shell of a person and it makes Joseph’s heart throb painfully to see. He does not know how to fix it. It isn’t something they’ve dealt with before.  
  
Joseph takes to telling him stories. If he doesn’t want to talk, he can listen instead, so Joseph tells him how he met Nicholas, back when they were Yusuf and Nicolò, he tells him about what’s now called the Renaissance in Florence, he regales the stories of some of their more humorous accidental deaths, like the time Nicholas tripped and fell off a bridge or the time Andrea choked on a chicken bone that they had to pry from her esophagus with a fork before she gasped back to life. Sébastien does listen, and laughs or smiles appropriately, but his heart is not in it.  
  
Nicholas asks, at least a few times a day, if he’d like to talk about it. About the battle, about his family, about his death, about anything at all. Sébastien always thanks him but declines.  
  
On the sixth night, Sébastien wakes up screaming in terror as if he’s being attacked, and the other three leap into action. Knives appear from underneath pillows and brandished at enemies they soon realize don’t exist. Sébastien is still on the ground in the makeshift bed, panting harshly as if no breath is deep enough to still his racing heart.  
  
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he breathes, “it was just a dream. I’m sorry.”  
  
Andrea swears under her breath and drops her axe onto the desk. She lights an oil lamp that floods the room so they can see each other. She meets Joseph’s eyes again like she had in the train car, shaking her head with such a helpless, hopeless look in her eyes that Joseph is sure is reflected on his own sweat-damp face.  
  
Sébastien mutters additional, desperate apologies, and Nicholas shushes him and kindly tells him it’s alright.  
  
“Is she real?” Sébastien asks, with a shuddering inhale.  
  
Joseph frowns. “Who?”  
  
“She feels real,” Sébastien babbles, rolling over onto one side and curling miserably in on himself. “Like when I dreamt of you.”  
  
Andrea swears again. Understanding dawns in Joseph and it feels like being slapped.  
  
“Because he hasn’t met her,” he says, “I didn’t even think of that.”  
  
“So, she is real?” Sébastien asks, into the pillow.  
  
Andrea turns on her heel and leaves, walking toward the terrace hanging over the shop below and shutting the door behind her. Nicholas has his knuckles pressed to his mouth, eyes wide and shining as if he’s about to cry, so Joseph answers.  
  
“She’s one of us. We lost her, two hundred years ago.”  
  
“What do you mean, you lost her?”  
  
He sits on the edge of the mattress and folds his hands in his lap. Sébastien is still curled into a ball on the floor. “She’s trapped, right? In your dream?”  
  
“Yes,” he says in a small voice. “In some kind of … I don’t even know, metal thing. Looked like a medieval torture device.”  
  
“It’s iron, and it’s locked, and it’s at the bottom of the ocean somewhere in the North Atlantic.” It hurts in Joseph’s heart to say the words out loud. He’s not sure he ever has before now. The only people he’s spoken to about it in two hundred years are people who already know what happened. He’s never had to tell the story. “We do not know exactly where. We searched and searched but never found anyone who could tell us.”  
  
Sébastien finally looks up at him, blinking and moving to a more upright position, resting on one elbow. There are tears in his eyes, and there seem to be on a nearly constant basis these last few days, but his frown is curious. “What did you mean when you said it was because I’ve never met her?”  
  
“We dream of each other until we meet,” Nicholas answers. He walks over and sinks to the floor in front of Sébastien, his arm touching Joseph’s left leg. “It is how we find each other. We are shown bits and pieces, backgrounds, locations. It’s how we found you. You have stopped dreaming of the three of us, yes? But you haven’t met Quynh.”  
  
“I cannot meet Quynh,” Sébastien amends, realizing what Nicholas and Joseph are so reluctant to say. “So, it’s not going to stop? I am just going to keep seeing her drowning forever?”  
  
He sounds so despairing that Joseph’s stomach churns again. “Or until we find her. Or until … she does not wake up.”  
  
“I thought we couldn’t die.”  
  
“It’s only happened once. To a man Nicholas and I never met, he was gone before we were born. But one day he didn’t heal like we’re supposed to, and he died. We have no way of knowing but we have to assume it will happen to all of us eventually, we just cannot know when.”  
  
Sébastien looks overburdened by the information and does not reply, he merely draws his knees up toward his chest and wraps his arms around them. Nicholas moves closer to him, putting an arm around him and letting Sébastien lean on him. His eyes are wet when he looks back at Joseph, and Joseph tries to smile reassuringly but he’s sure it ends up a grimace.  
  
He stands and leaves them, leaves Sébastien sniffling and Nicholas speaking to him softly, in favor of joining Andrea on the terrace.  
  
“I’m calling it off,” she says as he approaches, without turning around. She’s leaned on the railing, her forearms supporting her weight and staring down into the darkened, empty street.  
  
Joseph mirrors her. “Calling what off?”  
  
“Quynh.”  
  
For a moment, he shuts his eyes. He can still see her so vividly, as if she were right in front of him. Black hair gleaming in the sunlight, the most brilliant smile, the most vibrant laughter.  
  
“You were right,” Andrea continues heavily, “all those years ago when we fought because you wanted a break. Every day we spend searching for her is a day we aren’t helping anyone else.”  
  
“We regretted it the moment we left,” Joseph says. He never told her that at the time, and he should have. “I was too stubborn to turn around and come back. Too afraid of being so overrun with grief that I would lose Nicolò, too. We’d already lost her, and you. I couldn’t lose him.”  
  
“I know,” Andrea says softly. She reaches over and touches his arm. He clasps his hand over hers, squeezing lightly. “We haven’t found even a whiff of her, in two hundred years. The ocean is … the ocean. It’s the biggest fucking thing that exists. Maybe one day in the future something new will be invented that will help us locate her. Until that day, this has become pointless. Even if we could find where they dropped her, she might not still be there. She could have been carried ten thousand acres away on a current.”  
  
Joseph nods. He doesn’t need to voice his agreement for her to know he does.  
  
“I miss her,” Andrea whispers, and Joseph squeezes her hand even tighter. “I miss her so much sometimes it feels like I can’t breathe.”  
  
“So do I.”  
  
She inhales deeply and lets it out slowly, shaking herself a little as if to dislodge the thought she’d been stuck in. “I think maybe finding him was a sign. If there’s ever been any rhyme or reason to why we exist, maybe he was sent to tell me it’s time to move on.”  
  
“Don’t feel you have to give up on her for us, Andromache.”  
  
“I’m not.” She turns, briefly meeting Joseph’s eyes and then looking back inside through the cracked window. Nicholas is still on the floor, sitting close to Sébastien, telling him an animated story. Sébastien is smiling reluctantly. “He’s taking all this way harder than any of us ever did. He has more to leave behind than we did, and he’s been shattered by it. He needs us. The _real_ us, not what we’ve become. He needs a family.”  
  
Joseph nods. He lifts his arm and she tucks herself against his body, and they lean on each other as they watch Nicholas gesture so passionately that he accidentally smacks Sébastien in the shoulder, and they both laugh. Andrea huffs fondly, and her head rests on Joseph’s shoulder.  
  
* * *

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The History of Smolensk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk#Modern_history)   
>  [The Battle of Smolensk](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Smolensk_\(1812\))


	10. Toronto, 1974

_“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”_  
 _Helen Keller, 1940_  
  
  
They draw straws – or, in this case, toothpicks with one broken in half – and Nicky loses and gets the last shower. Three other people’s hairs sit wetly in the drain trap and the hot water runs out as he’s shampooing. He’s sure his surprised shriek as he’s flooded with the icy spray is of great amusement to his family in the other room. Assholes, every one of them.  
  
His skin is bright pink from the chill as he steps out of the stall and regards himself in the foggy mirror. He rubs at his head with a threadbare mint-green towel, pulling the material away and leaving his hair in accidental spikes. He combs through the short strands with his fingers, brushing them to one side and off his forehead.  
  
The others are moving around beyond the door, he can hear them walking and chatting, can hear Andy’s laughter and Booker’s halfhearted complaining. The sounds are familiar and they warm him, even as he still shivers a little from his cold shower. He dries the rest of himself with the towel until its thin fibers are saturated and then he dresses, pulling back on the jeans and t-shirt he’d removed to bathe. They’re clean enough, especially for where they’re headed. Underground bars don’t tend to be the most sanitary of places.  
  
Nicky hangs the towel over a hook on the wall and opens the door, letting out the remaining steam and hit with the even cooler air on the other side. The scene that greets him has his eyes widening in surprise. In the time he’s been in the bathroom, the others have done themselves up in outfits – costumes, they can only be described as costumes because none of them would normally dress like this – in order to fit in at the bar.  
  
Andy is in tiny denim shorts and a leopard-print top that shoves her breasts up toward her collarbones and leaves very little of her figure to the imagination. Her short hair has been spiked with some kind of gel that has blue glitter in it. Booker is entirely in leather except for a red bandana tied around his head, his pants impossibly tight and a series of colorful buttons pinned to the ample lapels. Dark eyeliner is smudged around his eyes, making the whites stand out against his tanned skin. And Joe … Nicky loses his breath for a moment when he finds Joe’s shirt – if it can even be called a shirt – to be made almost entirely of mesh. Miles of his brown skin is visible underneath the netting, muscles obvious as he moves across the room toward Andy with the eyeliner in his hand so that she can draw on him, as well. It is an eyeful of him that is usually reserved for Nicky’s personal gaze and right now is on display for everyone to see.  
  
Their faces turn in unison to him, and almost equally in unison, frowns decorate their foreheads.  
  
“ _Hell_ no,” Andy says instantly, “you are _not_ going dressed like that.”  
  
“What?” Nicky asks, defensive. “This is what I was wearing earlier.”  
  
“Exactly,” Andy replies, as if he’s supposed to know what that means.  
  
When confusion remains written on his face, Booker bluntly states, “you look straight.”  
  
“I am _not_ straight!” Nicky protests. He has over eight hundred years of a very healthy sex-life with a man under his belt to prove it and is highly insulted by the suggestion.  
  
Joe laughs fondly. He walks over, hooking a bent finger under Nicky’s chin and tilting his face up for a kiss. “Trust me,” he says, against Nicky’s lips, “I know you’re not.”  
  
“If gayness is cumulative, technically you are the second gayest man in the universe,” Booker quips. “Congratulations.”  
  
Nicky rolls his eyes. “Thanks, Bash.”  
  
Joe continues, “and under normal circumstances, I find your complete indifference to fashion trends utterly charming.”  
  
“But?” Nicky prods. His hands settle flat on Joe’s chest, dark nipples so easy to locate in his shirt made basically of loosely braided string.  
  
“But ya look straight,” Booker repeats. He’s examining himself in the mirror, further smudging the makeup under his left eye with the tip of his middle finger.  
  
Nicky drops his hands exasperatedly. “What on earth does that _mean_?”  
  
“It means that the types who frequent these bars don’t tend to be quite so buttoned-up,” Joe explains. “It’s Halloween and there’s a drag show, people are going to be dressed like us or in even crazier get-ups. We’re trying to blend in, and you’re gonna stick out like a sore thumb.”  
  
“Here.” Andy comes over, her favorite leather jacket in her hands, held out in Nicky’s direction.  
  
Nicky eyes it and looks at her incredulously. “That is not going to fit me.”  
  
She grins and her eyes dance. “I know. That’s the point.”  
  
Nicky huffs. He snatches it from her and slides one arm into a sleeve before she stops him.  
  
“No, babe,” she says, still smiling annoyingly. “Shirt off.”  
  
A muscle works in Nicky’s jaw and he glares at her as Booker snickers across the room, but he does what she asks. He tugs his t-shirt up over his head and then slips the jacket on. It barely stretches over his broad shoulders and restricts the movement of his arms, gaping wide open at the front because there’s no way he could come anywhere close to zipping it up.  
  
“I look ridiculous,” he complains.  
  
Andy ignores him. “Book,” she says, turning back to him, and without looking up Booker takes the tube of hair-gel from the counter and tosses it in her direction. She catches it one-handed and squeezes a generous glob of it into her hand, rubbing them together to spread it over her palms. She steps in close and starts tugging at Nicky’s still damp hair, mussing it, shaping it into messy spikes like he accidentally had earlier with the towel except this time they’ll stay _and_ they’ll be covered in blue sparkles like hers.  
  
She surveys her work after she’s done, looking to Joe for approval. There’s something hungry in his eyes as he looks Nicky up and down, carefully controlled but unmistakable, and Nicky’s stomach swoops. Joe holds out the eyeliner to her, deciding, “stupid if we all do it. It’ll look better on him.”  
  
Andy hums in agreement and takes the pencil. She moves in, gently cupping his face in one hand and leaning forward until she’s so close he can feel her breath on his cheek, carefully drawing underneath his right eye. “He does have gorgeous eyes,” she says softly.  
  
“Don’t I know it,” Joe teases.  
  
“If you’re all done flirting, the drag show starts in an hour,” Booker tells them.  
  
Andy steps back again and nods in satisfaction at the mess she’s left on Nicky’s face. He winces and looks up at Joe, and that glint is back in his dark eyes. He takes Nicky’s waist in his hands and pulls him in for a deeper kiss.  
  
“I am never done flirting with this man,” Joe declares dramatically, and Nicky’s stomach flip-flops over itself again.  
  
“Well flirt _later_. We gotta go beat up some homophobes.”  
  
* * *  
  
Their target is St. Charles Tavern, a queer bar inside an old clocktower from the last century. It sits in the heart of a generally queer neighborhood so for most of the year, the rest of the city leaves its patrons to their own devices. On Halloween, the one night a year local police won’t arrest people just for being who they are because _it’s a costume, officer_! is an easy defense, drag queens parade themselves down the sidewalk in front of the tower and angry citizens hurl insults and projectiles at them from behind flimsy barricades.  
  
Last year, two people were killed when a queen fought back and the clash got out of hand. Booker had read about it in a newspaper in Chicago and rushed over to them, brandishing the paper with concern splashed all over his face.  
  
_But they’re like you,_ he’d said, upset when Joe explained it wasn’t their usual type of gig, especially in the modern world with all its flash photography and video cameras and paparazzi. Too potentially high profile, the risk of casualties too small to be worth potential exposure.  
  
_They aren’t hurting anybody,_ he’d insisted. _They’re just dressing up, celebrating being who they are. Shouldn’t we protect them?_  
  
Joe had sipped his coffee thoughtfully and exchanged a meaningful glance with Nicky, who’d nodded emphatically, touched by their brother’s consideration. Joe had stood to wrap Booker up in a bear-hug that the man seemed a little confused by but accepted eagerly anyway, still often visibly starved for touch even after a century and a half with them.  
  
_Of course we should, Bash_ , Joe had said, using the affectionate nickname he’d given their new friend Sébastien years before the man had settled on an alias for himself.  
  
In the present, Booker elbows Nicky gently as the four of them make their way down Yonge Street. They’re moving two-by-two down the sidewalk, Andy and Joe ahead of them. “Wanna know something amusing about this area I found when I was researching?”  
  
“Sure.”  
  
Booker gestures around them. “This neighborhood was the estate of a magistrate named Alexander Wood in 1810, he was at the center of a political sex scandal and then the area was nicknamed ‘Molly Wood’s Bush’. Molly was slang for gay at the time.”  
  
Nicky blinks and turns that over in his mind for a moment, and then snorts when he gets the innuendo. “That’s terrible.”  
  
“Funny, though, right?”  
  
“Unfortunately, yes, it is.”  
  
Across the street, a male voice jeers at them. He’s too far away for Nicky to make out what he’d said, but Booker shouts, “hey, fuck you!” back at him and then possessively puts his arm around Nicky’s shoulders.  
  
Nicky grins to himself and wraps his arm around Booker’s waist. He doesn’t need to be protected from mere words, he’s been alive far too long to let a bigot hurt his feelings, but he appreciates the gesture anyway.  
  
The bar is already thrumming in motion and activity by the time they arrive. Throngs of people are flooded on the dance floor, bodies moving around each other like a den of snakes, bouncing and happily waving their arms in the air to bass-heavy music. The lights are low and the spotlights colored, it gives the dizzying effect of being inside a kaleidoscope.  
  
Andy instructs them to split up and do a quick perimeter sweep, checking for anything that seems unsavory, but Nicky finds nothing at all in his pass over the front-right corner of the place. It’s just people, men and women and people whose gender he can’t assign just by looking, dancing and drinking and laughing. There are costumes, and there are people dressed a lot like Joe, and Nicky begrudgingly admits to himself that the others were right – he would have stuck out like a sore thumb in his t-shirt and slouchy jeans. It’s hot in Andy’s jacket, sweat already starting to stick the leather to his skin, but he can easily blend into the crowd.  
  
He ends his sweep at the bar, scanning the crowd for the others but unable to pick them out of the mass of bodies. He turns toward the bar instead, making eye-contact with a bartender at the other end of it, but before he can lift his hand in the air to get the man’s attention, Joe is behind him out of nowhere. Nicky knows it’s him even though he hasn’t turned around to see. He would recognize Joe’s touch anywhere.  
  
Warm hands push up under his jacket and cup his bare rib cage. Joe’s scent is intoxicating and everywhere, modern soap and hair oil and his own earthy smell that’s been unchanged since the very first time Nicky was in his arms. It leaves his mouth watering, leaves him feeling instantly drunk even though he’s fully sober. He’s heat and pressure against Nicky’s back. So quickly it makes his head spin, arousal throbs through him and Nicky wants nothing more than to press back into him, get Joe closer, feel Joe grinding slowly against his backside.  
  
“You look fucking gorgeous,” Joe murmurs to him, voice low and right in Nicky’s ear. Nicky shivers.  
  
“Joe,” he whispers.  
  
Joe pulls him back, pulls Nicky’s ass against his hips so Nicky can feel all of him just for a moment, one gorgeous shining moment where it’s just the two of them and the rest of their surroundings melt away, and then he’s gone just as quickly and Nicky is left shivering.  
  
“There’s condoms in the bathrooms.”  
  
He blinks, trying for a moment to locate the source of the words through the fog Joe put around him, and then he looks up into the smirking face of the bartender.  
  
“Oh.” Nicky shakes his head and stifles the embarrassed laugh that threatens to bubble up out of him. “No, it’s …”  
  
“New around here?” the bartender asks him, when Nicky doesn’t elaborate because Joe left him woozy and he can’t seem to string a sentence together.  
  
He’s a slight man – kid, really, when Nicky actually looks at him – shorter than Nicky and skinny, with bleached blond hair that falls into his eyes and a black t-shirt that stretches so tightly across his lean chest that Nicky spares a thought to wonder how he even got into it, and how he’ll get out.  
  
“Pardon?” he asks.  
  
The kid pulls a round tray from under the bar and lines it with shot glasses, chatting casually with Nicky as he works. “This place is mostly regulars, and I don’t recognize you. Or your handsome friend who clearly just gave you a stiffy and then left you hanging.”  
  
Nicky looks back over his shoulder, but Joe has disappeared into the thrumming crowd. The kid isn’t _wrong_ , and that only adds to his embarrassment. Underneath that, though, is the pleasant thrill of the idea that here, Joe could stick his tongue down Nicky’s throat in front of a hundred people and they wouldn’t bat an eyelash. It’s very, very new, in their long life, to be able to say that.  
  
When he pries himself from his own contemplations, he notices the bartender has given up on him and has migrated back to the other end of the bar, where he’s taking a drink order from a man dressed as Dorothy from _The Wizard of Oz_.  
  
“I saw that.” Booker appears beside him, grinning and shaking his head. “What a jerk.”  
  
Nicky laughs uncomfortably, and then laughs comfortably as Booker keeps smiling at him. He turns around to lean against the edge of the bar and rubs a hand over his face, conscious of not messing up the eyeliner. “Right?” he asks, in on the joke now instead of the subject of it.  
  
“Back at the motel, he looked at you like he wanted to … well, I was raised a good Catholic and I’m not sure Jesus would appreciate me saying it out loud,” Booker jokes.  
  
Nicky snorts and knocks his shoulder into his friend. “Come on,” he says, grabbing Booker by the wrist. “Let’s dance.”  
  
He drags Booker out onto the floor. A few feet away from them, Andy is dancing with a drag queen in the shiniest, sequined pink gown Nicky has ever seen. It’s difficult to even look at, reflecting the lights around them and turning her into a living disco ball. Andy turns under their clasped hands like a ballerina, laughing loudly. They’ve only been here ten minutes, Nicky isn’t sure how she’s already managed to make a friend, but she’s always been like that. She’s a lighthouse. People gravitate toward her like they couldn’t help it if they tried. That light had gone out, after they lost Quynh. Nicky is happier than he could express to see it shining again.  
  
Booker stays serious. He moves with Nicky, going through the motions of dancing, but he’s focused more on surveying the room around them, looking for threats as if there might be deadly assassins lurking behind every shadowy corner.  
  
“We’ll hear it pretty easily, if shit starts going down,” Nicky tells him, poking Booker gently in the ribs. “You can relax a little.”  
  
Booker’s mouth curves into a small smile, laughing a little at himself. He bounces a few times on the balls of his feet to the relentless beat of the music. “Sorry.”  
  
“Don’t be sorry. Just dance with me.”  
  
Raising an eyebrow, Booker takes the challenge in spectacular style, grabbing Nicky around the waist and dipping him dramatically as if they’re in a ballroom dancing competition. Nicky snickers and holds on as he’s lowered toward the floor and then pulled abruptly back to his feet.  
  
“That’s the spirit,” he chuckles.  
  
“This place is just so full of joy,” Booker says, looking around with a frown briefly back on his forehead. “I don’t get how anyone could want to hurt it.”  
  
The sincerity on his face tugs at Nicky’s heartstrings and, seemingly before his brain has actually instructed his limbs to move, he’s squeezing tight around Booker’s middle and pulling him into a hug. Booker is stiff in surprise against him for just a moment but then his arms slide around Nicky’s back.  
  
“Don’t let your man catch us, he’ll think I’m trying to steal you,” Booker jokes, but his voice is thick.  
  
“So, let’s find you somebody,” Nicky says. He pulls out of the hug but stays close, still swaying with him but slower, now.  
  
“Sure,” Booker answers, and it isn’t convincing.  
  
“It’s okay to have fun, you know,” Nicky tells him quietly. “Even if it’s just for a night.”  
  
Booker nods and looks down between them. “Yeah,” he says, just as quiet, and heartstrings are tugged again inside Nicky’s chest but he doesn’t push it. Instead, he keeps dancing.  
  
When the song ends and blends into the next, Booker excuses himself, citing a need to use the bathroom. Nicky does a quick scan around the room in his absence, but still sees nothing but writhing bodies. _Joy_ , as Booker had said. Nicky knows that not a single person in this room has an easy life but here, together, they’re happy. It feels like flowers are blooming in his chest, being part of it.  
  
A hand taps him on the shoulder and Nicky turns, expecting it to be Joe. It isn’t. The man is massive, towering over him and shirtless, with muscles that bulge like rolling hills along his arms. Nicky’s eyes widen, intimidated just for a moment, but then the man smiles at him, and his face is kind.  
  
“Wanna dance?” he asks, bright blue eyes blinking hopefully. Almost bashful, even though he looks like he could pick up a car and toss it across the road.  
  
“Oh,” Nicky answers, surprised.  
  
Behind the man, Nicky finally catches sight of Joe again. He’s watching them. He’s on a barstool, elbows leaned on his knees, and even in the low lighting Nicky can see the intensity in his gaze. He’s barely blinking, staring intently at them.  
  
Nicky chews on the inside of his cheek and looks back up at the specimen still grinning down at him. “Yes. Sure, that would be nice.”  
  
The man’s head tilts curiously to one side. “Italian?”  
  
“I am,” Nicky answers. “Moved here last month, from Rome.”  
  
“ _Why_?” the man asks with a laugh.  
  
Nicky hadn’t thought that far ahead, and stumbles. “Uh …”  
  
“It doesn’t matter.” A hand waves between them and then the man moves in closer. His giant palms find Nicky’s hips. “You agreed to a dance, not to give me your life story.”  
  
Nicky licks his lips, and watches the man track the movement of it with his eyes. Feeling the weight of Joe’s gaze still on them even though Nicky doesn’t look back at him again, he smiles up at his new friend and curls his fingers over massive biceps as they begin to move sensually together. “I’m Nico,” he says.  
  
“Derek.”  
  
“Hi, Derek.”  
  
The volume of the music increases, or maybe it’s just the rush of excitement in Nicky’s ears as he moves with the man and can feel Joe watching them like it’s a brand on his skin. Nicky is hot everywhere, suddenly, skin prickling and heart thumping in his chest. Emboldened, he makes a show of it, rolling his hips sensually and running his hands up Derek’s arms.  
  
Joe lasts longer than Nicky’s expecting. The beat changes and the song flows into another and they’re still dancing, sweating on each other, so that Nicky will smell like another man when they finally part ways and knows that will drive Joe crazy. Glitter drips down the side of Nicky’s face from his hair that Derek wipes away with his thumb. Derek spins him, turning Nicky around so he can plaster himself to Nicky’s back possessively and wrap meaty arms around his waist, and Nicky knows before it even happens that this will be the breaking point. That spot belongs to Joe, it always has, and anticipation swoops in his gut.  
  
Seconds later, right on cue, Joe is in front of him. The corners of his lips are curved but his eyes are black and penetrating. “Havin’ fun, honey?” he asks, loud enough for Derek to hear.  
  
“I am,” Nicky answers, smiling in faux innocence. “This is Derek. Would you like to join us?”  
  
The man’s movement behind him slows, Derek looking up at Joe, and then glancing between them, and then making a small sound of understanding as it dawns on him. “This is your …”  
  
“Husband,” Joe finishes, a bold edge to his voice. Silently threatening, daring Derek to challenge him. “But thanks for keeping him warm for me.”  
  
Derek laughs. It isn’t what Nicky was expecting. He claps Nicky on the shoulder. “Alright, I get it. It was nice to meet you, Nico. Have fun, boys.” He’s still chuckling as he walks away.  
  
Nicky frowns after him but isn’t given time to consider whether maybe it wasn’t very nice of him to lead someone on before Joe has wrapped a hand around his wrist and is dragging him away. Through the crowd, down a dark hallway, and out a back door that leads to the alley. Cool air bursts onto Nicky’s sweaty skin and he inhales sharply as it hits him. Joe is pushing him up against the bricks before Nicky can get his head around it, crowding into his space and letting their mouths crash together in a rough kiss.  
  
“Mmph,” Nicky says unhelpfully as Joe’s tongue slides into his mouth.  
  
Joe pushes against him like he’s trying to climb into Nicky’s skin. Nicky can feel him everywhere, in his lungs, in his veins, as Joe plunders his mouth and grinds into him.  
  
“Thought he could drape himself over you like that,” Joe growls. He nips at Nicky’s lips, kissing him like he’s really angry even though Nicky knows he isn’t.  
  
“I knew it,” Nicky boasts, and does nothing to keep the note of smugness from his voice. “Knew that would set you off.”  
  
Joe’s hand slides down, shoves between the wall and Nicky’s body, and squeezes a generous handful of his ass. Then he grabs Nicky’s hips and turns him bodily like the man had on the dance floor, shoving Nicky into the wall and crowding up behind him, reclaiming his spot. Nicky grins and breaths heavily with his cheek scraping the bricks as Joe gently bites the back of his neck and pushes his hips forward, letting Nicky feel him, hard in his tight pants. He rolls his pelvis forward, rubbing his trapped erection against Nicky’s ass, the message even louder than if he were screaming _mine!_ at the very top of his lungs.  
  
“Yours,” Nicky agrees, panting and so aroused he’s dizzy. “All yours.”  
  
“Don’t you fuckin’ forget it.”  
  
Nicky lets Joe grind into him for another minute and then he moves, catching Joe off-guard and flipping their positions. When he has Joe’s big body trapped against the wall instead of his own, he slides his hand over the straining bulge in Joe’s pants, tracing the outline of his cock, squeezing it and delighting in Joe’s needy moan.  
  
“You could have gotten us in trouble, you know,” Nicky says to him, rubbing him, the pressure deep enough to drive him crazy but nowhere near as much as he needs. “That guy was twice your size, what if he’d decided he wanted to fight you for me?”  
  
Joe snorts, and Nicky tugs roughly on his hair in punishment, making him hiss.  
  
“What, you don’t think anyone else could want me that much? I’m not worth being fought over?”  
  
Joe swears at him and struggles to free himself so he can turn around, back to the wall, and take Nicky’s face in his hands. The kiss is rough and bruising, but his thumb swiping over Nicky’s cheekbone is gentle and affectionately, he murmurs, “everyone wanted you. I watched you out there for twenty minutes, everyone had their eyes on you. I know damn well how lucky I am.”  
  
Nicky’s eyes close and he slows, pushing his forehead against Joe’s and curling his fingers around Joe’s hips. The mesh of his top is rough under Nicky’s palms. “I could never want anyone but you,” he whispers. He knows Joe knows it, but that’s never stopped him from saying it. For over eight centuries he’s been saying it, and it’s never stopped being true.  
  
“You liked me watching you, huh?” Joe asks. He slides one hand over Nicky’s back and down the back of his jeans, squeezing again but against bare skin this time.  
  
“Yes,” Nicky answers. His heart skips a beat or two as one of Joe’s fingers presses in between his cheeks and the pad of it pets at his entrance.  
  
“Liked moving your hips like that? Shaking your ass, knowing it would turn me on?”  
  
“Seems to have worked,” Nicky teases, and Joe’s chuckle is soft and self-satisfied.  
  
“I’d strip you and fuck you right here against the wall if I’d thought to bring lube.”  
  
The desperate edge to his smooth voice slides down Nicky’s spine like honey. He takes Joe’s other hand and guides it down, so Joe’s fingers make contact with Nicky’s cock in his pants. He inhales quietly as Joe cups him, his hand a warm pressure.  
  
“Worked on me, too,” Nicky whispers. His dick throbs in his pants as Joe plays with him, the tip of it already messy and sensitive, pressing into his underwear. Joe’s face is close to his, too close to see it properly, features swimming in Nicky’s blurry vision.  
  
“Kiss me again?” Joe asks, and Nicky does, sliding their lips together in a slower, more languid, utterly delicious embrace. Joe moves his hand and pulls Nicky in closer, encouraging him to roll his hips so they can rub against each other, thighs slotted just right where they need to be to send sparks along Nicky’s heated skin.  
  
“You look gorgeous,” Nicky says into the kiss, returning the compliment Joe had paid him earlier at the bar. “Drove me mad, a little, thinking of all of you on display like this for anyone to see.”  
  
“All yours, though,” Joe promises, as Nicky had earlier. “Always, always yours. _Fuck_ , Nicky, just like that.”  
  
Nicky pants into Joe’s mouth and rocks against him for another minute and then he stops abruptly, answering Joe’s questioning whimper by sinking slowly to his knees as Joe watches him with shining eyes and parted lips.  
  
He runs his nose along the length of Joe’s covered erection, stomach flipping over itself as Joe exhales shakily. Nicky tugs inelegantly at the button and fly, working them open so he can slide the pants down. Joe’s cock bounces as the waistband passes over it, perfect as ever, the skin flushed to purple and the head glistening. Nicky’s mouth waters just looking at it, feeling the heat from it on his lips, nostrils filling with the scent of arousal.  
  
He looks back up at Joe through his eyelashes as he lets his tongue out to lick at the tip, the salt bursting onto his tastebuds. He does it again, and another time, dragging the flat of his tongue over Joe’s slit and then pulling away, teasing him. Then he curls his fingers around the warm base of Joe so he can suck the head into his mouth.  
  
Joe breathes his name, fingers tangling into Nicky’s hair and head bumping into the wall behind him as it falls back in pleasure. Nicky’s lips stretch as he moves forward and takes the hot length of Joe into his mouth. He moves his tongue back and forth along the underside, and when Joe moans Nicky can feel it, vibrations rebounding through him, sliding and grating along nerve endings. In his own pants Nicky’s cock throbs with his racing heartbeat and he cups his free palm around himself, pressing it up against his belly, desperately wanting to hump forward into his own hand but holding back.  
  
“Look so fuckin’ beautiful like this,” Joe is babbling, as his hips move forward in the smallest, most careful thrust, and his fingers tug at Nicky’s hair, just on the razor edge of painful.  
  
Nicky pulls off Joe’s cock and mouths wetly along the side of it, jokingly asking, “is it the eyeliner?”  
  
Joe chuckles. “It would be a lie to say I don’t like it.”  
  
Nicky smiles. He strokes Joe’s cock, fingers wrapped snugly around it, the skin soft and delicate under his palm. He presses kisses low on Joe’s abdomen, nuzzling into him, and then backs up to swirl his tongue lavishly around the head of Joe’s cock again before letting it slide back into the warm cavern of his mouth. Joe whimpers beautifully, muttering more words of praise, and Nicky takes Joe’s hips into his hands and blinks back up at him, not needing to speak the words aloud for Joe to understand what he’s asking for.  
  
Joe’s fingers tighten in his hair and he rolls his hips, his cock dragging tantalizingly over Nicky’s tongue as he fucks slowly into his mouth. Nicky’s eyes water at the edges and he draws in warm, moist breaths through his nose as Joe increases the speed of his thrusts, face twisted beautifully in pleasure as he loses himself in it and fucks Nicky’s mouth with increasing abandon.  
  
“Oh, _fuck_ , Nicky,” he groans, tugging at Nicky’s hair again, the pain of it sending shockwaves through him. “You’re so perfect, so good for me. Don’t move, honey, just like this.”  
  
Nicky hums, desire imploding in his gut at the noise it draws from Joe and the way his hips buck, cock bumping into the back of Nicky’s throat until all he can think, all he can feel, all he can breathe is Joe. Filling his mouth and lungs, Joe running through his veins, Joe consuming his mind and heart and his very soul.  
  
“Touch yourself,” Joe rasps, as Nicky struggles to breathe around the intrusion in his throat, “but don’t you dare come. Not ‘till I can get my hands on you.”  
  
It isn’t in Nicky to disobey; like it’s Joe’s brain that controls the movement of Nicky’s limbs instead of his own, his hand travels down to the straining bulge in his jeans and he presses against it. He moans around Joe’s cock, rubbing his erection roughly.  
  
“That’s it. Your fucking mouth looks so good wrapped around me. Fuck, you’re sexy.”  
  
Nicky begs for more without words, swallowing around Joe and pulling at his hips, dizzy and drunk with how good it feels when Joe lets go of himself and thrusts forward recklessly and, with a shout that could be heard in the next street, comes down Nicky’s throat. Nicky swallows and swallows until he’s gasping for breath and Joe is the one gently moving away because Nicky, they both know, would be all too happy to suffocate like this. He’s never been able to get enough of Joe, of _them_. Not since the very first time.  
  
Joe strokes his hair and keeps murmuring to him, words that Nicky can’t hear over the rushing in his ears. His forehead lolls against Joe’s hip, suddenly all too aware by the ache in his knees that they’re in a dirty alley behind a bar and not somewhere with a bed nearby for them to collapse together into.  
  
“Sweetheart,” Joe whispers, tugging lightly at the collar of Nicky’s – of _Andy’s_ – jacket. The effort feels gargantuan but Nicky stands on shaky, cramped legs, and Joe is kissing him again, tongue diving in to taste himself in the caverns of Nicky’s mouth.  
  
Between them, Joe’s fingers fumble with Nicky’s jeans and when his hand pushes into them and curls around Nicky’s cock he could cry in relief. The noise he does make would be shameful if he were with anyone but Joe, anyone but the beautiful, wonderful love of his life. He leans heavily against Joe, letting him take half his weight, while Joe strokes his burning erection.  
  
“My love,” Joe is still whispering, nosing through Nicky’s damp hair, talented fingers finding every spot that makes Nicky twitch and moan and want to beg for more. “My whole heart, the sexiest man in the entire world. Everyone knew it, in there. Everyone wanted your mouth and I’m the one who gets it. How the stars aligned in my favor I’ll never know.”  
  
Nicky shivers in pleasure that spins him out of orbit, like he could end up among the stars if Joe wasn’t here keeping him on the ground.  
  
And then, in the near distance, there is a shout. And then a crash, and another shout, and Nicky freezes, dread dropping like a stone in his gut.  
  
Joe’s hand stalls in his pants, the line of his body tensing as they both look up and toward the mouth of the alley.  
  
“Shit,” Nicky breathes.  
  
“We – ” Joe begins, but there is a loud bang before he can get another word out.  
  
Nicky’s entire body goes hot and cold at the same time, panic rolling through him mixed with anger, and frustration, and the near-pain of his arousal being doused like a candle in the space of seconds. He shoves himself back into his jeans, wincing in the discomfort of it.  
  
“Later,” Joe is promising tersely. His face is flushed and his hair is a mess from Nicky’s fingers, and he looks just as annoyed and disappointed as Nicky feels. “Later I am going to lick every single inch of you. Maybe hoist you up against the wall, fuck you like that. Helpless in my arms, begging me to let you come.”  
  
Nicky groans and digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. He can see it so clearly in his imagination. They’ve taken each other like that so many times, and it’s a considerable amount more work than while lying down, but always worth the effort. “Thanks, now I have to go fight a bunch of assholes with _that_ in the back of my mind.”  
  
Joe smirks at him and pulls him into a deep, too-brief kiss. The promise of it lingers on Nicky’s tongue as they take off in the direction of the ruckus.

  
  
*** * ***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Church and Wellesley](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_and_Wellesley#:~:text=From%20the%20late%201960s%20through,During%20the%201970s%2C%20the%20St)  
> St. Charles Tavern [x](http://thenandnowtoronto.com/tag/st-charles-tavern/#:~:text=It%20was%20built%20in%201870,Tavern%20took%20root%20in%201951) [x](https://www.thestar.com/life/2020/01/02/st-charles-clock-tower-was-an-important-early-example-of-queer-visibility-in-toronto.html)


	11. Genoa, 2020

_“Isn’t it just so pretty to think all along there was some invisible string tying you to me?”_  
 _Taylor Swift, 2020_  
  
  
The ocean just before dawn has always reminded Joe of his beloved’s eyes. Pale, sparkling green, with flecks of sky blue when it catches the minimal light. Clear and endless. Quiet and calm, but with a storm unseen underneath.  
  
The view from the upper balcony of the little house they’d built in the eighteenth century is breathtaking. The cliffs crumbling into the sand below, the warm sea, the cascading sky that travels forever toward the horizon and far, far beyond where Joe’s human eyes can see. When they built it, there were no other houses nearby. They were alone on the cliffside, where they could be safe together in a time before their love would have been accepted. Now, there is a paved road and a small smattering of cottages, and the constant white-noise of tourists on the beautiful stretch of beach below. Joe doesn’t mind the change. They have enough room to keep to themselves, and it’s nice to have a bit of life around them.  
  
For two centuries they have found solace in this place. The guest room on the first floor has really been Andy’s room, when she has wanted to be with them. They brought Booker here, too, back when he was still Sébastien, because he’d been so broken by the loss of his cherished wife and treasured children and he’d needed time to heal in a peaceful place.  
  
For two centuries the bricks and plaster have protected them from the wind and rain. The wooden floorboards have creaked under their bare feet. The orchard with lemon and olive trees out back have grown fruit that graces their table. The walls decorated with Joe’s paintings have borne witness to their hysterical laughter, to their affectionate teasing, to their unbridled passion. Their home has always been in each other, necessarily, but this place is as close to a physical home as they’ve ever had, and Joe wouldn’t trade it for anything.  
  
When he heads back inside to refill his coffee, Nicky is swaying his hips gently as he hums to himself, slicing an orange on a marble cutting block on the counter. He doesn’t hear Joe come in – or, if he does, he doesn’t react to it – so Joe leans against the doorway and simply watches for a moment. He vaguely recognizes the tune Nicky is humming but can’t place it. They might have heard it five hundred years ago, or maybe it’s a new pop song they heard on the radio just last week. Nicky brings a slice of orange to his mouth and tastes it, hips still moving.  
  
He certainly knows now that Joe is watching him. He wiggles, suggestive and silly all at once, and damn it does Joe ever love him. He loves this man to the end of the universe and back, loves him on their worst days, loves him with a stronger gravitational force than the sun holds on the planets in their solar system.  
  
Joe sets his nearly empty coffee mug on the weathered kitchen table and heads for his husband, stepping in closer behind him and wrapping his arms around Nicky’s waist. Nicky lifts another orange slice, holding it above his shoulder for Joe. He slides it along Joe’s lips, the juice leaving them sticky, and Joe sucks it from his fingers. Sweet and tart bursts on his tongue and he makes a contented noise before pressing a sticky kiss to Nicky’s cheek.  
  
“Hey,” Nicky complains, laughing. He taps his cheek where Joe’s mouth had touched it, and Joe laves his tongue flat over the spot, cleaning him up. “Grazie.”  
  
“Prego,” Joe murmurs. He nuzzles into Nicky’s neck, nosing through rough stubble from a week without a shave. “Are you going to join me to watch the sunrise?”  
  
“I guess I should. It’s only once in a blue moon that you’re willingly awake in time to see it.”  
  
“I will certainly drag you right back into bed after it’s over.”  
  
“It’s a deal.”  
  
Joe steals two more pieces of the orange from the counter and then drags Nicky with him, back up the stairs and to the terrace. He sits on the stone bench and pulls Nicky into his lap, arms going back around his soft middle and nose burying in the fabric of his t-shirt. Nicky is heavy on top of him, and warm, and Joe’s eyes slip closed until Nicky urges him to look up. The emergence of the sun is majestic, the entire world turning dark and mysterious blue for a few minutes before light peeks over the distant horizon.  
  
True to his word, once it’s high enough in the sky that they have to squint, Joe gets up, knocking Nicky out of his lap and then scooping him up around the thighs. Nicky laughs loudly and complains as Joe fireman-carries him back to their comfortable bed and dumps him onto it. Nicky bounces and gives Joe a middle finger, and Joe growls at him happily and pounces, covering Nicky’s body with his own. Their mouths crash lightly together, tongues twisting around each other’s, the sweetness of the fruit still on Joe’s tastebuds.  
  
Joe kisses him until his lips tingle numbly, laying heavily over him like a blanket and slowly rolling his hips down, interest brewing between them, bodies sliding lazily together. Nicky moans underneath him, a beautiful, wanton sound. Joe nips at his plush lower lip and rocks his hips a little deeper to hear it again. He has never, in over nine hundred years, ceased to be humbled by these gifts his Nicolò gives him. He remembers vividly how difficult it was for him, in the beginning, and will burst with pride for Nicky and how far he’s come until the day he leaves this world.  
  
“What time is this?” Nicky asks, words slurred into their messy kiss.  
  
“Hm?”  
  
“Sex,” Nicky clarifies, an impish lilt to his low voice. “We’ve only been back a few days. How many times does this make?”  
  
Joe chuckles. They have spent most of their year-long break at their house in Genoa, but they were just in Rome for two weeks, for a change of pace and scenery.  
  
He kisses along Nicky’s jaw and down his neck as he answers, words punctured by pecks of his lips to familiar skin. “No idea. Maybe thirteen? I lost count immediately, I can’t resist you. I need you all the time, daily, hourly. I need your touch and your body tangled with mine, need you trembling underneath me, need you filling me up with your beautiful cock until it’s all I know.”  
  
Nicky’s fingers grasp at his hair as Joe continues his descent. He shoves Nicky’s t-shirt up underneath his armpits so he can lick over brown nipples, tickling Nicky’s stomach just to watch him squirm and then kissing the skin in apology. His plaid boxers are tented and Joe noses into the erection underneath them, feeling the heat of him through the fabric, his scent tantalizing.  
  
“Yusuf,” Nicky whispers, not urging Joe to quicken the pace, not really, just saying his name because he likes the way it tastes on his tongue.  
  
The boxers are loose enough that Joe can get at his cock without removing them, tugging back a leg opening and revealing his prize, flushed and swollen and resting against Nicky’s hip.  
  
“Hello,” he murmurs fondly to it. “You look lovely dressed in green plaid.”  
  
Nicky snorts. “You’re an idiot.”  
  
“You’re the one who loves an idiot,” Joe points out with a shrug and a kiss to the head of Nicky’s cock.  
  
“So much. I never stood a chance,” Nicky answers. His fingers card through Joe’s hair and his eyes, when Joe looks up at him, shine in the early morning sunshine cascading in through the open window. “You were a hurricane.”  
  
* * *  
  
They spend the rest of the day in town. There is a café in the square that makes the most delicious espresso brownies Joe has ever tasted, they order three with their lattes and Joe eats two with gusto while Nicky smiles at him. They walk along ancient cobblestones, absorbing the history of this place, feeling the ghosts of their former selves around every corner. The world turns, the sun rises, and everything changes, but they don’t. Not in the ways that matter. Their love for each other grows, and maybe evolves, but doesn’t change.  
  
In the afternoon, Nicky wanders out into the yard. Joe follows him after he finishes up a rough sketch of an orange cat they’d seen in town, to find Nicky looking serenely up at one tree in particular – the largest, right in the center of their little garden. Joe knows it’s the first one they planted, nearly a century ago. As he watches Nicky touches the center of the trunk, fingers rubbing slowly over the bark as if he’s speaking to it, and Joe’s heart swells in his chest.  
  
He remembers vividly the day they planted it, as the smallest, most fragile sapling he can recall ever seeing. The Great War had been over for some years but the devastation lingered, and they were exhausted by it all. Nicky had wanted something alive, something they could care for, something that would grow tall and strong with enough nurturing. It had been six years before it produced its first lemon – a puny, untenably sour little thing – but Nicky had been so proud of it. Now it stands twenty feet high at least, sturdy and magnificent, and its yearly blossoms have given them an orchard.  
  
He makes his way over. Nicky plucks a ripe, brilliant yellow lemon from the tree and brings it to his nose, smelling it, feeling the smooth surface under his thumb. When Joe gets close enough he wraps his arms around Nicky’s waist from behind as he had early that morning and rests his chin on Nicky’s shoulder. Nicky’s head tilts sideways, leaning against Joe’s as he picks a few more lemons off low branches and places them tenderly into the bowl he’d brought out with him.  
  
“Dance with me?” Joe requests.  
  
Nicky turns his face into Joe’s so that Joe can feel him smile against his cheek. He’s expecting Nicky to comment on the lack of music, but Nicky doesn’t. He merely extracts himself from Joe’s hold long enough to set the bowl down onto the grass and then turns in Joe’s arms, his own sliding around Joe’s waist and moving in close. Joe drapes his arms around Nicky’s broad shoulders, the fingers of one hand coming up to rest cupped around the back of his head as they sway in the stillness and the long, late-afternoon shadows.  
  
Nicky hums, low and quiet, the same melody he had earlier before they watched the sunrise. Joe recognizes it this time, although he still couldn’t say where they heard it. It is a modern tune, a love song, and in Nicky’s deep, resonant voice, it vibrates through them both like the purr of the cat Joe had been drawing. It reverberates down into his bones, relaxes him from the inside out.  
  
* * *  
  
In the evening, Nicky cooks for him, a delicious, creamy pasta dish, garnished with lemon zest from their own trees. Joe eats entirely too much of that, too, and praises Nicky until he blushes and rolls his eyes and begs Joe to shut up.  
  
As the light begins to fade outside, they make their way down to the beach below their home on the cliff, climbing easily down a precarious but well-worn path that they’ve trod for centuries. They aren’t alone, on the beach, but it isn’t crowded. Near the other end of it, sunbathers soak up the last of the day’s rays as early evening clouds begin to turn pink and orange in the sky, and children shriek happily in the water, splashing each other and laughing. Nicky lowers himself to the ground with his back leaned against a pale rockface and his legs stretched out in front of him, bare feet in the sand. He extends his hand, reaching up for Joe with a hopeful smile on his face.  
  
As if Joe, in any time or space, could refuse him.  
  
Joe takes his hand and settles comfortably between Nicky’s legs, leaning back into a familiar chest, familiar arms wrapping snugly around his waist from behind. Joe’s lips curve into a smile as Nicky brushes fingertips over his stomach, and he reclines, letting Nicky hold him, head tipping back to rest on Nicky’s broad shoulder. It’s more luxurious than the most expensive mattress because the warm body cradling his belongs to someone who loves him.  
  
“D’you think Andy will call, soon?” Nicky asks.  
  
“I hope so,” Joe answers. He has enjoyed their break. He’s enjoyed such a long stretch alone with Nicky, with no violence to disrupt their serenity, with nothing but endless sunshine and all the time in the world to hold each other as they do now. But he, like Nicky, misses their family. He’s thought, a number of times, that they should have invited Booker to stay. Joe misses him and plans on making it up to him as soon as he can.  
  
Nicky doesn’t respond. His hand slips underneath Joe’s linen shirt, palm resting on his stomach.  
  
“You know,” Joe tells him, “if you looked on a map, Tunis is almost directly South. When I was small, I used to sit on the shore and look across the sea to the North and wonder what was over there, beyond the horizon.”  
  
“You did?” Nicky asks in a soft voice, and when Joe nods, he continues, “Joe, so did I.”  
  
Joe opens his eyes in surprise. He tries to twist around to meet Nicky’s gaze but he can’t, Nicky has leaned forward to bury his forehead into Joe’s neck, arms tightening around him to keep Joe close against his chest.  
  
“Amore mio,” Joe whispers.  
  
“It was you,” Nicky says. Joe can feel warm breath on his neck.  
  
Joe exhales. He turns his face, nose finding Nicky’s soft hair and inhaling him. “My mother used to say she didn’t know what was across the sea. I always felt it had to be something important. I didn’t believe her when she said it might be nothing at all.”  
  
“We have always been connected. Pulled toward each other by something we couldn’t see, but always felt. It was you,” Nicky repeats, emotion thick in his deep voice. “All those years, all those times I felt incomplete and looked to the sea for hope that something more existed, I was looking at you. Waiting for you.”  
  
“And I was looking at you.” Joe nudges his face, needing to see him, and finds Nicky’s eyes wet when he shows them to Joe. Joe reaches up for him, cups Nicky’s cheek in his hand and brings him in for a kiss. Into the press of their lips, he teases, “sappy.”  
  
Nicky chuckles. He leaves his forehead resting intimately against Joe’s, noses touching between their faces, and answers, “about you? Yes, I am.”  
  
“Do you even fathom how much you are loved?” Joe murmurs. Nicky’s arms are the warmest, safest place for him to rest, and he snuggles in closer. “Love isn’t erased at the end of every night and reborn in the morning. It adds up. When I fall in love with you again every day it piles onto the love from yesterday. That means you are the most loved person who has ever lived, my Nicolò.”  
  
“I’m not. You are,” Nicky argues in a soft voice. His hand moves, palm rubbing Joe’s stomach slowly. “I loved you first. My life had been nothing but fear and hellfire until I met you, and you were gentle and warm and caring. You accepted me, you taught me how to be a better man. You taught me to love. I loved you long before you loved me.”  
  
Joe shakes his head, and emotion forms as a lump in his throat. His voice wavers as he says, “I won’t argue because I don’t have any dates in my head to prove you wrong, but Nicky, I loved you for a long time before we ever admitted it. I was captivated by your eyes, by your voice, by the gentle soul I saw in you. I think more likely we’re tied, even if we haven’t loved each other evenly every single step of the way.”  
  
“Tied. I like that.” Nicky’s lips slide over his, barely a kiss but heartfelt and Joe feels it to his toes. “And I love you. Endlessly.”  
  
“Perpetually,” Joe adds, and Nicky nods, remembering Florence. “I’ve loved you more than any living person has ever loved another. I’ll never get tired of telling you.”  
  
“I’ll never be tired of hearing it.”  
  
Joe gives him a real kiss, this time, searching lips and wandering tongues. When they break apart to breathe, he promises, “and I’ll never go anywhere I can’t bring you with me.”  
  
“Neither would I,” Nicky responds, as he always has. “I wouldn’t want to.”  
  
* * *

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!! Comments and sharing the link make our hearts happy 💛
> 
> Follow author paperstorm [on tumblr](http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/)  
> Follow artist GrinAndBearIt [on tumblr](https://adarlingartwork.tumblr.com/) [or instagram](https://www.instagram.com/adarlingartwork/)


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